Was writing something you’d ever considered before starting your blog?
It wasn’t, actually. When I was doing my GCSE English, my English teacher used to compliment me about my creative writing, but I really wanted to study languages, so I concentrated on French and German and just dropped English completely. I didn’t keep a diary, and I only really got into blogging because I liked fiddling round on the internet rather than because I thought I was going to enjoy the writing. I sort of rediscovered that I enjoyed it, but I hadn’t done it since I was 16. 

What do you think the difference between diaries and blogs is, apart from the obvious?
I suppose a diary’s only written only for the person who’s keeping it, but when you’re writing a blog, you’re writing for an audience.  When I started mine, I definitely wanted to entertain people, I wanted a readership. I started writing about France because I thought that was the angle that would interest people the most. When I do something I like to do it properly!

What part do you think the internet is going to play in the future of books, and what do you think of other people like Lily Allen or Sandi Thom who have also made it big starting from the internet?
I think that it makes it much more democratic, it’s easier for people to break out and I think that’s quite important in a world where it’s hard to get a record deal, where the music industry is flattening the amount of choice you actually have, so it’s nice that other voices are heard that never would have been otherwise. I’m not sure whether Lily Allen was actually a MySpace success, or if that was a marketing setup. In the case of blogs, I know one woman who was an illustrator and she’d taken time out to have kids, and then because she put illustrations on her blog she started receiving work illustrating lots of magazines.  And a few friends of mine have got book deals.   So it’s great that people are able to have this platform, that they would never have had otherwise and to get a chance, to get a stab at being published.

I know when you write your blogs you choose what you put on them, but do you ever think about the lack of privacy, when you meet people who know your blog really well...?
It is quite strange when I meet people who know my blog, and they already know all sorts of things about me already, but I’ve got used people knowing stuff about me when I meet them, so it’s weird having to explain all these things to someone who doesn’t know!  But a lot of the time when I’ve met people through the blog, they’re people who have blogs as well, so I know a bit about them too.  But it is strange, because you meet someone and you’ve used up all your best anecdotes already, or you’ll start saying something and they’ll go, “oh yeah I know about that, I read it”. 

So what do you think the worst and the best things about having a blog are?
The best thing about it has been all the doors it’s opened for me. I’ve made a lot of really good friends through it and had a relationship with someone.  I got a book deal through it!  Being fired was not fun, so I would say that was the worst thing that happened to me, but then it did have a silver lining. If I hadn’t been fired I probably wouldn’t have ended up with a book deal, because publishers are aware of blogs, but I think I would have had to write a book and pitch it to them – they wouldn’t have come looking for me, so I know that I became attractive because I’d had a lot of publicity which they could then build on to sell my book.

What’s been the highlight of your time as a person with a book deal, and a published author?
Probably the day that I went to meet the different publishers that were interested in the book. I came to London on the Eurostar, and I met four different publishers. Every time I arrived somewhere there was a boardroom with about ten people sitting around there, some of them quite senior, so it was very intimidating but flattering. They’d all sort of rolled out the red carpet.  So Penguin had got little fish and chip cones, because they’d read on my blog that that was one of the things I missed about my life in England, so they’d been really clever. They gave me some Mr Men VDs for my daughter, they’d read that she really liked them. And I went on to the next  publisher and they had little French cakes, and the next one had an English cream tea, and by the end of the day I couldn’t eat any more, I was just so full.  And in fact the meetings were so stressful I didn’t really eat much really, it was all for show, but that was the best day. 

As someone who’s fluent in French and who lives their life essentially in French, do you have any tips for language students like me who are trying desperately to become fluent?
I think there’s no substitute for spending time there, totally immersed. My first experience was a French exchange where I stayed with someone for two weeks and I came back much more confident.  I just remember the first few days where I had to make the girl repeat absolutely everything that she had just said, and by the end I was much better and I’d learnt all this great slang.  But really, I didn’t become fluent until well after I’d finished university when I first started working in France and actually having to do jobs in French.

Have you got any tips for bloggers, people who want to start blogging? 
If you want to write a personal blog, you’ve got to think very carefully about what your boundaries are going to be, and I think it’s a really good idea to be anonymous. I gave away little things without even realising – the Daily Mail managed to find out who I was because I mentioned one of the schools I once went to, and I’d forgotten that I’d had a tiny profile on Friends Reunited, and they found me on there.  They put two and two together, found a girl who was living in France and the dates matched.
But if you want to start a blog and try and make it popular, there are all sorts of little tricks you can do. For example. I knew which were the most popular blogs out there, because the Guardian used to compile a list of Best British Blogs.  So I wemt on them and left witty comments that make people click back to see who you are.  Some people sign up on lots of blogging directories as well, with a little description of what you’re writing about so people can find you...people often got to my blog through expat groups.
But then of course that gets you one click from somewhere and you’ve got to hold their attention, you’ve got to be offering something entertaining or something new – there’s always got to be something that will make people come back.  It’s all very well having them visit once – I remember when I was on the front of CNN, I’d just been fired, and I had 40, 000 visitors that day. A few months later that had gone down to 8 and then 4, and then back to a normal level.  People come once out of curiosity, but the challenge is holding their attention so they keep coming back.
Blogs are over-represented in Google because of the way it works. I used to have lots of people come onto my site through the search term “ginger suppository punishment” and I was like, “what does that even mean!?” and actually, it could be that the word “ginger” was in one post, the word “suppository” was in another, the word “punishment” was in another, and the way Google searches it brought that up as a term.  So you get people coming through my blog who never really intended to end up there...

Catharine is currently working on her first fiction book, so watch this space for more scandalous tales.