Hi, I'm Sylwia and I administrate these forums. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. 
Now, probably your first question is how on earth one pronounces my name?
Here's a clue to the mystery: There's no letter V in Polish alphabet, so we treat W as double V - not double U. And since we read I as Y in YETI it's something like Sylvya (two syllables).
So now about me and Jane Austen:
I was rather late to discover Austen's book, and I'm ashamed to admit that my first contact with her was full of prejudice . I was never fond of love stories, and so when our teacher told us to read P&P I thought it an insult to my pride . Of course, I never knew myself till then! Jane totally pacified me. I read all her other books soon after and was very sad there was no more.
Some years later someone told me that Colin Firth was chosen to play in Bridget Jones because he played Mr. Darcy in the 1995P&P. I didn't know who was Colin Firth, but I knew I wanted to watch the series, and so I did, and fell in love again.
In my hopeless attempt to find more Austen's books than I knew she wrote I researched online bookstores and found Pamela Aidan's trilogy. I bought the two first books and found her website to read the first chapters of the third. But the story wasn't finished, and when more and more people began to visit her site daily for updates, the message board there began to thrive.
Then Laura, in all her naivety, asked a question that would make her a computer slave for the years to follow. There was a TV Regency reality show and the people there didn't have toilets. Laura's concern was that it's not so romantic to think of Lizzy and Darcy when the level of hygiene was so lacking. Of course, I had to save the image of her heroes for her, so my extensive research followed. (Just to calm you down, the hygiene maybe wasn't perfect but England had it on a far higher level than the rest of Europe then, and there were flushing toilets by then, at least enough of them for Darcy to have them installed in his London house and at Pemberley). Anyway, the posts we exchanged then soon went astray from the main topic so much that we decided to continue our correspondence via email.
Then one of the girls on that board, impatient for the next chapter of the trilogy, suggested we should all take on one of the fictional characters and write nagging letters to Aidan. And so we did. Laura started as Lydia (and a hilarious Lydia at that!), I took on Darcy (somehow I thought he would be the easiest to write 
). At the beginning we were all frozen in the place of the story Aidan left us. So Lydia was locked in her room with Wickham, and Darcy was impatiently waiting outside of the said door to be able to talk to them and save Elizabeth's family. Then, after many weeks of letters, Lydia rebelled and ran away through the window. That started our active interaction with other characters. We had been playing like that for months until we decided to start a story. I asked Laura to take on Lizzy and from that point Scotch and Sirens began...
The whole game was hilarious though, and I'm always glad to still see some of the players around! One thing I should warn you about if you ever wanted to try it at home - avoid social gatherings! You don't even imagine what happens if one person asks another a question and then several people refresh the board every few minutes for a week because the person who was supposed to answer suddenly disappeared. 
I take great interest in many things, not only Austen and Regency toilets, so please feel welcome to post here about any topic you wish.
Sylwia
