Most of us had heard of her back around 2010 when the number of followers one had became a big deal. Twitter personalities where starting to break into the mainstream, and she was one of the first. But we didn’t know her name. We were told that she was the Canadian housewife with a million Twitter followers who parleyed that into a screenwriting career, had a glamorous life in LA and pissed off a million writers that wondered how she got so lucky.

But the truth was less sensational. It involved hard work, practice and years of writing for little to no money. It wasn’t the American dream I had imagined. Or even cared to.

Now Kelly Oxford is famous, despite what she tells us. She is a New York Times bestselling author, she has a TV deal, a movie deal, she gets to talk to FAULT, and still finds time to annoy the Kardashians and their legions on Twitter: “If you can name 5 Kardashians but can’t name 5 countries in Asia, stick a knife in an electrical socket.”

…

FAULT: Do you know how the story of you coming out of nowhere came about?

Kelly: The first time I got picked up by the media was a charity event in Los Angeles called ‘Night of 140 Tweets’ at the very beginning of 2010. That was a celebrity event where people would read a Tweet was to raise money for disaster relief in Haiti. I was the only one out of 140 people that wasn’t a celebrity. I was just a writer from Canada. I was a housewife. I was somebody who nobody really knew and I was only invited because people that were involved with this – actors and writers – liked me on Twitter and thought, “if we put her on this it’ll make sense because she’s very popular on Twitter and this is a night of tweeting.” All of a sudden I was part of a group of people when I really wasn’t one of them.

…

How did it [really] begin for you?

If I had been born in the United States, I’m 100% sure that when I graduated high school I would have moved to Los Angeles and started a normal writing career by becoming an assistant and working my way up the ranks. But I was Canadian. That sort of thing wasn’t an option for me. I could have moved down here and done all that stuff, lots of Canadians have, but I wasn’t ambitious about getting a career. I’d rather have a family and stay at home and pursue my passion. So I just did what I did, which was to just take some writing classes and write things on my Geocity page and just wonder if anybody would read it.

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