Many of our long-time members may look back a little misty-eyed this week, recalling the time when one year ago this week the BBC's Grand Poobah decided to rip the guts from the Get Writing service, leaving many without a place to air both their work and their grievances.

Indeed it was a momentus and vociferous time for those who were there. One week earlier however, in the corner of a dusty house that badly needed painting, something happened to change all that. A new project was born. Designed to feel kinda familar and cosy to Auntie's refugees, Great Writing (see what we did there?) poured itself into cyberspace to cheers, applause and much back-slapping and pint-buying all round.

Like hell.

Getting out there wasn't easy. I'd laughingly thought to myself that this was a no-brainer. A ready-made audience about to be evicted; we'd have no trouble snapping them up. Quite why I wanted to do this escapes me. Maybe altrusim, maybe ego, maybe as they say, 'because it's there'.

Except it wasn't. To receive a large audience, we needed a big house. As any of you who've tried building a website may know - it's rather like herding cats. Especially trying to look at what the Beeb did with all their licence fee lucre, and then go one better with nothing more in our pockets than 17p and a button. And yet two well-meaning fools thought themselves equal to the task and pressed on with a song in their hearts and Marmite on their chins. For six whole weeks last winter the BBC community rallied for their site, drawing up petitions, protests, even writing to Tony Robinson. And for six weeks, we knew we must play Devil's Advocate and press on with ours; drawing buttons pixel by pixel, writing lines of lines of code to make the buttons do the pressy thing that they do (can you tell I didn't write the code?), all of it to be ready in case the Beeb's axe fell.

Fall it did. But not before a few other madmen had had the same idea we did and announced the arrival of their own community sites first. Gah! What the -? How could -? But-? Tsch-? Now our attempts at dogooding had apparently become a scramble for audience share. Perplexed, but never slowed, we pressed on wind, rain and private messages lashing against us as we closed to the finish and opened the beta. Finally. Finally, we got the bloody thing working well enough to let the public in.

The opening was modest. Many had gone off to other sites and settled in. A few of you trickled by each day to see what the fuss was about. Meanwhile I'd emailed every writers' group, literary society and tea room in the country trying to drum up trade. Even the lure of a free holiday in a launch contest met with only modest success.

And now look where we are. 600-strong and counting. Interviews with celebrity authors, even a mention on Bradford local radio. And let me tell you, it doesn't get any bigger than that. We never did get a whole bunch of BBCites, but in the end I like to think that slowly, steadily we've forged our own path. All of us together. From those early 100-worders, to Spidey's flash poetry contests, to our new ongoing soap opera . All the best bits have come from you, the Great Writing members. I'd like to thank you all for coming, and invite you to relax and stay awhile longer.

But I want to express my greatest thanks to one person who made it all possible. Y'know, when I'm designing websites I'm often reminded of Kenny Everett's mime character; the one who'd draw a picture of some stairs, then proceed to climb them. It's one thing to draw a picture of a creative writing website. It's quite another to make it work. But nascent did just that, joining me on my fools' errand and delivering the bag of tricks that let you and I do what we're doing right now. No, no I mean the reading and writing stuff. Don't be vulgar.

So nascent gets the gong. She's the one who built this site, she's the one who's done most of the running of it lately, and she's the one who'll point out (and silently) correct the grammatical errors in this epistle. All in all, it's not bad for a llama, and she gets my warmest contrafibularities and a blue plaque above the door.

Cheers everyone. Keep writing y'all.

M