Side ponytails, unite!

When I was a little girl, my brother Ben and I had a club. We were the Tiger Club (tigers being both intimidating and pleasingly stripey), and mostly I remember having meetings via flashlight in Ben's closet, and plotting to build periscopes out of hand mirrors and paper-towel rolls, and always having to make up a new secret handshake because we'd forgotten the old one. Our parents inexplicably would not let us get a tiger to be our mascot; when I was six or seven, we eventually bargained them down to a turtle (practically the same thing anyway, you know) for which we saved up for months and then changed our club name to match. As you do. Scooter the turtle, I will have you know, was a fine and noble mascot for many years, and I think taught us all a lot about the joys of heat lamps and live crickets.

Last week, I picked my brother up at the airport--he's back in the States after five years abroad, and local to me for the first time since middle school. Thus begins the longest, most awesome Turtle Club meeting ever! He's so excited to be back in the land of pork and uncensored movies, and I am so excited to have him here for general bothering/fun-having purposes, even if it means driving him to every furniture store in the greater DC area until his apartment is furnished (I have a car; he does not). You can guess what we did this weekend.

So what I mean to say, I guess, is this: If you come to DC and it does not seem quite the same as it was, if it seems slightly more awesome and yet also slightly more weird, think of us, and know that the Turtle Club is hard at work.

Now, if we can just find enough hand mirrors, we can finally finish those periscopes.

12 of 12: October

Heyyyyy, it's that time of the month again. So to speak. For all info and background on the 12 of 12 project, see Chad Darnell's blog; it's his baby.

And here we go:



8:45 - Waking up gloriously late. Thanks, Columbus/indigenous peoples!




9:34 - Making the morning admin rounds for the newly launched Austenacious; my assistant sleeps on the job.




10:22 - Stopping by the cathedral on my morning run.




10:25 - My favorite place on the cathedral grounds, the Bishop's Garden.




12:47 - Um, lunch. IT HAS FRUIT IN IT, OKAY? Don't judge me or my baked goods.




1:39 - On the bus to Georgetown.




2:01 - Taking myself to the movie show: Whip It, which I liked very much. It did not, however, help resolve my inner conflict over roller derby (in which I dig the derby culture, but also dig my bone structure as is).




4:04 - In Georgetown, waiting for the bus back up the hill.




4:25 - In line at Giant, where I didn't even bother to track down a basket. Note: hand-carrying frozen peas around will eventually make your hands cold.




5:53 - Working on an original pilot script. Anybody know any agents looking for fresh TV-writer blood?




7:20 - Magic risotto, starring peas and zucchini and a whole lot of parmesan. Time-consuming, but it keeps me fed all week.




9:41 - Skyping with my friend Carly, whom I've known since birth and who is now super-adorable and thinking of becoming an English major. I approve.

That's all, folks! See you all next month.

Introducing Austenacious

I have a new website. Maybe we're not fully ensconced in the 21st century yet--there are no cards for this, no "it's a site!" banners, no candy cigars to hand out. Instead, we have frantic networking and checking of Google Analytics, which is plenty entertaining to a new website owner, but it somehow lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

Meet Austenacious, where the women are accomplished, the men are smoldering yet virtuous, and nobody ever gets mocked for being a great reader (or, for that matter, for taking pleasure in a great many things).

This is a labor of love--or, really, a labor of friendship. Brainstorming began with Christine and Heather before I moved to the East Coast, and our slogan, "Jane will keep us together," has proven true: we have the full inboxes and the hours logged on Skype to prove it. We think Jane would have liked what we're doing: reading and watching and thinking and talking and laughing and definitely, definitely eating, and looking at her works with the required sense of humor. We certainly like it.

So now you're invited to look around: check us out, join the discussion, leave a comment, tell a friend! (Especially that last one: the internet is a big place; getting the word out is tough.)

Welcome.