Sarah's Books & Life: Guest Post: I'm a Geek Girl

Today, I'm pleased to have Joy Preble, author of the Dreaming Anastasia series, here today with a guest post about being proud of your inner geek!

Yeah, I’m a Geek Girl: Live With It!

Joy Preble

(Author of the DREAMING ANASTASIA series from Sourcebooks: DREAMING ANASTASIA, 2009; HAUNTED, 2011, ANASTASIA FOREVER, 2012)

People often ask what my inspiration was for the DREAMING ANASTASIA series. And part of the answer, of course, is my fascination with the tragedy writ large that is the Romanovs. Like so many people, I have always wanted to believe that there was more to it than political assassination and a girl who died before she could be what she could be.

But then there’s the other part of the answer. The part of me that wrote Anne because I’d grown up with a love of genre fiction and then cut my writerly teeth on the work of Joss Whedon. That girl is an unrepentant geek. A nerd. And so of course I’d end up writing a book with witches and mermaids and soul jar trope dudes who can’t be killed and a romantic hero who’s handsome and blue-eyed but really kind of a doofus at heart. We geek girls write stuff like that. It’s in our DNA or something. We memorize the titles of Buffy episodes and we go with our friends to the opening day of Serenity and when Adam Baldwin guest stars on Castle with Captain Mal himself, Nathan Fillion, we squeal with geeker joy. And we Tweet that our husband just quipped, “Hey. I hope they run into the Rievers.” And the other million geeks who follow us on Twitter tweet back that this is the greatest line they ever heard.

And stuff like that.

So I present to you: You Know You’re A Geek Girl When. With geeky bullet points and everything. And yeah, it’s all true. Get over it, folks. This is the real me.

You Know You’re a Geek Girl When:

You agree to appear at Comic Con in Austin with your fellow geek authors. In a mermaid costume. For two days.
Your favorite moment of the above is meeting James Marsters who played Spike on Buffy. And getting a picture. Signed. (Which you babble about for two days, at least when you can get a word in over Tricia (PJ) Hoover’s rambling about her photo op with Kevin Sorbo.
Did I mention the seaweed boa?
You put physics and economics jokes in your manuscript and your agent tells you that maybe this is not as funny as you think it is. But you believe that giving a character a t-shirt that reads ‘Fission Chips’ is hysterical. And that the joke “Two protons walk into a black hole… that’s the joke” is also the funniest thing ever. Really.
You Google ‘nerd t shirts’ while you’re eating your lunch. More than one day a week.
You still know the titles of every BTVS episode. And can still quote lines. And if someone says anything close to ‘dance of joy’ your first thought is of Season 2 of Angel when the gang went to Pylea.
When you realized that you now knew and worked with the blogger who used to blog as Moonrat, you were happy for like a million days. Maybe more.
You saw The Avengers on opening weekend. And you knew that you had to stay seated when the final credits rolled because it wasn’t really over.
You also saw The Cabin the Woods. And chatted with your fellow geeks about how it was a meta-horror genre movie. Possibly too meta. But whatever.
You played viola in the high school orchestra. And were first chair. And dated the 1^st chair bassoon player.
You own a full collection of the paperback novelizations of the original Star Trek series.
You used to write Star Trek fan fiction. Before there was the Internet. Yes, you and your geek friends exchanged yellow legal pads of manuscripts. Mostly about Mr. Spock’s love life. You now believe that if only you had titled it Fifty Shades of Spock, you would be on easy street now.
You continue to believe that there is such a thing as a tesseract.
You wish there were more people who would get excited about the Baba Yaga episode on Lost Girl.
You screamed in horrified delight at the end of this season’s Vampire Diaries.
You have worn socks with Birkenstocks. In public. But maybe only once.
You could continue this list for another thousand pages.