It was a first date at Swans Brew Pub. A blues band was playing.

"We went blues dancing, which I'd never done," said Tess Wixted. "It was very fun and sexy."

Halfway through dancing, it happened.

"We kissed on the dance floor and it was pretty darn special.

Not very poetic, but that's how it all went down."

The 55-year-old writer and blogger, who is also a program associate in the continuing studies department at Royal Roads University, plans to submit her "kiss story" to the Canada Kiss Map when it launches today.

The map is an expansion on the hugely successful Toronto Kiss Map, a Google Maps creation by writing instructor Chris Kay Fraser - a friend of Wixted's. The nature of the map means that users can zoom in to different parts of the country, such as Vancouver Island, to read anonymously submitted kiss stories tagged in specific locations.

Though the nationwide version has yet to launch, one user has already submitted a story tagged near Hillside Avenue and Graham Street: "You knew there was good in me somewhere. You pulled the smile out of me. I've wanted you ever since."

Meow.

The idea to create the Kiss Map came to Fraser while riding a streetcar in downtown Toronto six months ago.

"I was in a really foul mood," said Fraser. "And we passed this spot where I had this gorgeous kiss years and years earlier. Just looking at that place, it just turned everything around."

It hit her that she probably wasn't the only one in the city who had shared a special moment there. "I thought to myself, I wish there was a way to always see the city through those eyes, to somehow capture all the little beautiful moments in the city and put them all together."

She started plotting her own memories on a Google map. It began as a personal project, but before bed, she posted it on Facebook and asked others to contribute. By morning, she estimates 100 kiss stories had been added to the map.

"It has been shared all over the place," she said. "And it just grew from there."

The writing coach, who runs workshops and retreats through her company Firefly Creative Writing in Toronto, saw it as an opportunity for creative writing exercises.

Fraser received a grant from the Toronto Awesome Foundation, which funded the design of her own domain and website: Torontokissmap.com. Between the original Google Map and the updated kiss map website, there have been 101,858 hits and more than 700 kiss submissions.

In December, Fraser realized she was getting hits from as far away as Russia, India and Brazil. She zoomed out and found users weren't just submitting stories of Toronto-area kisses, but kisses around the globe - even Antarctica: "Penguins. Good God, I love their beaks."

"I'm just flabbergasted by how people have responded to it," Fraser said. It prompted her to expand the focus nationally.

Recently, Kay discovered the Kiss Map was included in an academic study by a Carleton University professor on how citizen mapmakers are changing the story of our cities.

"It was this cartography professor at Carleton . looking at how these simple web tools are opening up all these opportunities for people to re-tell the stories of the places where they live and superimpose their own interests and passions on top of maps," she said.

"I was quite thrilled to see this conversation about my project going on in a way that I hadn't even realized."

The Canada Kiss Map launches today at Canadakissmap.com. Zoom in to Victoria to submit your own story.

asmart@timescolonist.com