Happy eleventh day of Christmas! If we were going by the famous Christmas carol, today’s gift would be eleven pipers piping… however I suspect that nobody has much use for eleven pipers (or even one) these days. 😊 However, in keeping with the auditory spirit, I’m giving away something that I hope will be a …
I trust you’ve been enjoying our 12-Days-of-Christmas posts with all the excellent giveaways! Here’s day 10, followed by the next installment of the Sanditon Group Read. You may have taken down your tree and moved on. But it’s still Christmas here at Austen Variations! We’re up to day ten, marked in the song by TEN …
…5 WORD SEARCH PUZZLES! I’ve been pretty quiet around here this past year. More than a year ago, I started working at a bookstore, which I love, but there’s a long commute, which I hate. So basically an 8-hour work day becomes an 11-hour workday. Yikes. My reading has slowed, my writing has slowed, time …
Happy 4th Day of Christmas!! In my newest novel, The Knight Before Christmas, my characters, Emma Westwood & Austin Knightley, make a special dessert — a chocolate-apricot torte, reminiscent of the famous Viennese Sachertorte. My husband and I were in Austria back in the mid-1990s, and we each enjoyed a generous and oh-so-chocolaty piece of …
As you can see from the title of this post, I’m doing double duty here today! We’ll get to our Sanditon discussion in a moment, but let’s talk Christmas first! In the famous old song, the third day gift is (sing it with me) “…three French hens…” But I’m not sure what the Austen …
Two turtledoves and dreams of their merry, merry Christmastimes at Pemberley or at their house in town. In early wedded bliss, perhaps – or surrounded by (more or less welcome) guests – or later, when there are children at Pemberley and the new custom Prince Albert had brought from his home country had begun to catch …
We’re off and running with our group reading of Jane Austen’s unfinished last novel Sanditon! (If you missed the introduction to this series, read it here to get caught up) I hope you enjoyed the first three chapters as I did. I’ve only read this delightful fragment once before, several years ago now, so I …
Several months ago, tremendous excitement overtook the Jane Austen world when we learned there would soon be an entirely new film adaptations coming our way! Not only was this one going to be based on a never-before-attempted Jane Austen work (her unfinished novel Sanditon), but it was being written by Andrew Davies, talented screenwriter of …
Dear Austen Friends, It’s been over two years since I released a new novel…but I’m absolutely thrilled to share this Austen-inspired Christmas romance with you all! I’ve wanted to write a story with a modern Emma & Knightley for ages—there’s just something deliciously fun about an independent woman who has almost everything, except for the …
With my first published book (Onoto Watanna, a biography of my novelist grandmother, in 2001), there was no such thing as a blog tour in existence, so I was innocent of the subject. The book was published by a university press, and since my grandmother was something of a pioneer, being the first Asian American …
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