Since this is my first post, I thought I’d kick things off by introducing myself. There are really only three things you need to know about me. These are as follows:
#1 – I am obsessed with pirates. I am also strangely compelled to wax rhapsodic about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, food and Lady Gaga, but pirates were my first love. Some have chalked this up to a preoccupation with the romantic ideal of the swashbuckling vagabond seeking fortune and adventure, inciting tales of vengeance and high drama on the seven seas. Truly, I’m sure all of that figures in somewhere. Mostly, though, I just love the way they talk. For example: in Piratical, a simple, every day request such as “Hey! You! Go get me a beer!” translates to: “Avast, ye bilge-swilling cur! Step ‘andsomely now and fetch me a tankard o’ hearty grog afore I run ye through fer sport and toss yer poxy carcass to Davy Jones!” For reals. What’s not to love about a dialect in which the more impressively one can swear and insult one’s fellows denotes one’s rank and status? Plus, they have shiny, shiny swords.
#2 – I knew I wanted to be a writer from a very young age, but I remember with piercing clarity the first time someone actually treated me like one. I was a few months into my freshman year of high school, taking a course that might as well have been titled “Science for Dummies.” We had to write a brief assignment describing the physical structures of the human digestive tract and how they work. In an attempt to stave off premature death from terminal boredom, I wrote mine as a first person narrative from the POV of a protagonist in mourning; someone had just “accidentally” swallowed his pet, Fluffy the goldfish (See, Vengeance Tales). So this guy was imagining – in gruesome detail – his beloved Fluffy’s final journey down the gullet, the esophagus, the stomach, and finally, the intestines of his arch-nemesis. When she handed my paper back to me with a shiny, red ‘A’ affixed to it, I’ll always remember the way Ms. Hoover looked at me, with a mix of bemusement, weirded-out wariness and pity. It was the first of many such looks I would receive over the years, ushering me not ungently into the ranks of my brethren, the writers of the world. We happy few, we band of barmy.
#3 – Dolls are terrifying.
And that about wraps this up. Stay tuned for many tales of debauched girl geekdom to follow.
"What’s not to love about a dialect in which the more impressively one can swear and insult one’s fellows denotes one’s rank and status? Plus, they have shiny, shiny swords."
ReplyDeleteHoly crap! The same can be said of Klingons.