Sorry for the little Doctor Who quote there, but it’s a good way to get things rolling. On my other blog, ReImagined Reality, I posted up my very first Speak Out With Your Geek Out post. The idea behind Speak Out With Your Geek Out is to support geekery in all its forms everywhere across the Internet. I began my other post like any Ten-Step Program would, so I’ll keep up the tradition…
Hi, my name is Shoshana and I write geek.
I don’t mean that I write like a geek, or that I write stories about people biting the heads off of live animals. No, I write geek in all forms in that I write science fiction, fantasy, horror and blog posts about everything geeky. I have written geek since I was knee high on a dog tiny. I started writing fantasy stories when I was in grade school. I re-wrote scenes from movies and comics and books that I didn’t like to include things I wanted to see (I didn’t even know that the term for that was fanfic by the way until MUCH later). I did all this because in my heart of hearts, I knew one thing – I had ideas. And they wanted to get out.
And my ideas were not happy relationship stories about women and men in everyday lives. They weren’t stories about children coming of age in a modern, normal world. Nope, my stories had witches and demons, robots and dragons, mutants and super heroes. To me, my stories had a drama that the every day world did not come anywhere close to exhibiting (and that’s the good drama, folks, not the sad silly drama). And when I was younger, I thought I was utterly alone in liking what I liked.
See, I grew up religious. And where I came from, people didn’t read Tolkien often. When I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia, other people looked at me funny. It wasn’t something they really trended on much and I felt like kind of a freak for having my head in realities that didn’t exist. In high school, though, I got lucky enough to meet another girl in my all-girls school who liked similar things. I felt less like a freak. She’s still my friend, over fifteen years later, and more like family. And all because we both spoke the same language, the language of looking at geek and digging it.
So I’ve written. And it’s not easy sometimes. People joke that all of my work is on some wacked out other planet. I’ve never written something that doesn’t have a supernatural bent to it, and that’s okay. I think that writing has to come from what you love and I love the unreal. I think that writing things that don’t exist in this world lets our minds expand and consider things that might never have been considered. The fantasy brings home concepts, criticisms or ideas that we might otherwise want to sweep under the rug, that we might never want to address. In the race to open our minds to accept bizarre vampire stories or alien love triangles, we writers manage to slip in themes about acceptance, prejudice, violence and ethical quandries for the audience to ponder.
And then, sometimes, we just want to write about demon dogs and hell beasts. Y’know, because that’s what tickles our noses.
The day’s come where I now write commentary on other people’s geek too. And that’s just as satisfying, where I get to talk about what I like and don’t like about the geek world around me. Sure, it’s not as satisfying as creating. Its not a short story done or a game development session come to fruition. It isn’t a novel nearly completed (oh God let me get it done soon!) but it is geek and it is good writing too. It is the spore-spreading of good geek content across the internet waves and that brings us as nerdlings together. So in the end, it is also words well spent.
I write geek. And I enjoy it. And I don’t think I could ever stop. After all, if you’re at something for so long, you start to look back and wonder what your life would be like without that thing, that one thing that lit you up for so long. And you honestly can’t imagine your life without it. That’s me and my writing, vampires and woogity demons and all.
May I never stop.