Hello, my loves!
This whole attempting to be consistent things is a lot harder than I thought, huh? I promise I’ve been thinking of writing to you all, but your girl has been so ACTIVE these days, it’s cray cray. However, I do have some juicy tidbits to share — if you’re interested. Come on, you know you want to…
Hello, my friends!
It’s Fri-yay and I definitely didn’t want to end the night without writing something new for you guys, as promised. So, I figured for today, I’d give you an NGC post about something new I’ve been doing: reading comic books!
Continue reading
Hi-Dee-Ho, folks!
I’ve been MIA for quite some time taking care of a few life changes, but now that most of them are squared away, I’m back — and with perfect timing too because a crap ton of trailers are out and I’m in my nerd girl feelings!
Darling won’t you ease my worried mind
We used to be best friends, >>> and I. I didn’t think anything of us being together, until I was about fifteen. I had just started a new year in high school and decided that I was going to “up” my appearance a bit. I got a new hair do, upgraded my clothing, and tried my best to be a bit more “outgoing.” He decided to do the same. He bulked up a bit after playing football at his high school and decided to start shaving more and wearing more form-fitting clothes. Continue reading
“You’re either in love with what you do, or you’re not in love.”
These were the words that I read in the back of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. And it’s almost as though I cannot escape them. Isn’t this the universal truth about anything that you invest your time and energy into? You either love it or you don’t.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m halfassing my goals because I’m not in love with them. Maybe I’m just in love with the idea and not the action itself … just like those women who love weddings and the idea of love but forget that they have to be in love and in a marriage the next day. Maybe…
After I finished Farenheit 451 I thought to myself, what would happen to us if there weren’t any books? What would happen to us, if we didn’t have a few words on a page to enlighten, to inspire, to sympathize? What if we only had bright lights and sounds to comfort us? Immediately, I thought I’d go insane. Even though I do not read as much as I would like to, the idea of having my face glued to a colorful box 24/7/52 just made me lose it internally. Can you imagine how mushy our brains would become?
But then I thought about the bigger issue … the issue of having a cause to fight for. And I wondered if I was “fighting” hard enough to become what I ultimately want to be. I know that my writing isn’t up to par, and that half the time (well, in the past few months, rather) my thoughts are disjointed … slightly incoherent. But does that mean I should stop all together — or just fight harder?
“They must write you. They must control you,” said Bradbury. “They plot me. I never control. I let them have their lives. ”
Word.
“I just let them speak. I don’t control them; I simply give them a podium and let them talk to me. All my good stories are told to me by the characters. I don’t write my stories. They write me.”
I used to just sit and wait. And then all of a sudden, a wave would wash over me. I would just start typing and typing away and next thing you know, there were characters on a page. And they were doing things. And saying things. And loving people. And kissing people. And killing people. The experience was like … a movie playing in the dark recesses of my mind and my hands were trying ever so hard to catch every moment, every detail so that it was out of my mind and onto a medium that everyone else could see. But it seems as though the movie theater is closed. And No matter how hard I try to pry it open, the boards are nailed down tight.
“You have to believe in that self as a writer, or you shouldn’t be doing it.”
Is it that my belief is not as strong … that I lack the appropriate amount of faith? Three unfinished novels, an unfinished novella and an unfinished book of short stories. People say that stories cannot write themselves, but I believe they can.
Maybe my characters have abandoned me until I am ready once again to give them all their much needed attention. Maybe they’re waiting until I fully believe that I am the one to tell their stories.
So I recently wrote a post for BlackGirlNerds.com about my love affair with Gargoyles and well, I decided that I should post it here as well … just in case some of you guys are hardcore fans.
I can’t deny it. I am a girl who is hopelessly in love with the cartoons of the ‘90s. These shows probably sculpted quite a bit of the geekiness that I’ve come to embrace in my life, but no show has possibly affected me more than Disney’s Gargoyles. When the show debuted in 1994, the opening score immediately drew me in (and to this day I still hum it). It was dark, scary, and (as I continued to watch) more than what met the eye.
If you’re not familiar with this amazingly awesome show, then you should be ashamed of yourself. But just to bring you up to speed, Gargoyles followed a clan of nocturnal creatures aka gargoyles that turned to stone by day and were warriors by night. After being betrayed by the humans they swore to protect, the clan was placed under a magical spell that turned them entirely to stone. A millennia later, billionaire David Xanatos (voiced by Jonathan Frakes) purchased their Scotland home and implanted them on his New York City skyscraper, where the spell was broken and they’re brought back to life. Tell me that doesn’t sound like a hot ass show to you?
The gargoyles, led by Goliath (voiced by actor Keith David), must now adapt to their new surroundings and they make a new friend in the process — police detective Elisa Maza (voiced by Salli Richardson) who in turn becomes their human guardian. Initially the show starts off with billionaire Xanatos trying to “befriend” the gargoyles for his own schemes of world domination, but later the show gets layered with the ever growing yet low-key attraction between Goliath and Elisa. It was obvious these two loved each other, but couldn’t be together because they were two different species. I mean, who didn’t hear Keith’s voice and melt instantly, right? But it gets better when Demona, Goliath’s former lover, came on the scene. Not only was she one hell of a villainess with her plot for human genocide, she was especially hateful towards Elisa for being the new object of Goliath’s affection. This ultimately made her hate towards humans richer. Oh — Demona was also Goliath’s baby mama. Yeah.
Much later we learned that some of the gargoyle eggs were saved before the horrifying betrayal (seen in the opening credits) and one of them is Goliath and Demona’s daughter, Angela. She joined the clan (which up until this point was strictly male), and tensions rose almost instantly between Broadway and Brooklyn. Broadway ultimately won Angela’s heart, but that led Brooklyn down a dark path for a while and boy wasn’t it one hell of plot line.
The show would weave Celtic lore and Norse mythology with characters from Shakespearean plays and — no lie — prepared me for college lit and history classes. As a child, I wasn’t attune to everything that was going on, but there were some things that I could truly appreciate. For instance, Elisa Maza was probably the first bi-racial cartoon character I had seen on TV. Being the daughter of an Amerindian father & African-American mother meant the world to me because we were finally seeing a real representation of the people who reside in NYC — multi-ethnic. We saw that Elisa had a brother and a sister and they were all different colors: her brother was a dark-skinned, while her sister was a little lighter with curly hair. And as for the police chief? She was a Latina named Chavez. Realism was on this show, whether you liked it or not.
Gargoyles exposed its viewers to different cultures; in one episode we learned of Anansi the Spider in Nigeria, and the legend of the black panther (or jaguar — I don’t know my felines that well) while on another episode we met Coyote the Trickster and understood his role in Native-American mythology. We saw King Arthur in his tomb on Avalon and the purported “aliens” that came to Easter Island. I learned the Oden was missing an eye before I watched Thor and met Macbeth before reading the play in high school. To sum it all up, this show had everything for me. There was action, history, magic, myth, love, and it was wrapped up so beautifully, that it effortlessly caused me to want to know all these “nerdy” things. This show was the beginning of my “blerdy” journey, if you will. I will admit, I didn’t keep up with the show during its final run in 1997. By then, the show moved from weekday afternoons to Saturday mornings which was a major bummer. It was only showing once a week AND on the day I was allowed to sleep late.
Trying to catch up with it was a task and I couldn’t keep up. When I heard it was cancelled, I was so upset, but the show lives on in me forever … obviously. I intend to find the Gargoyles DVD on Amazon, buy them, and have my own children watch them (when I have children, that is). Now excuse me, while I hum the theme song to sleep and imagine Goliath roaring into the night’s sky.
– See more at: http://blackgirlnerdy.blogspot.com/2013/07/my-undying-unflinching-love-for-disneys.html#sthash.c55PTPqz.dpuf
I am currently contemplating my next post … which will more than likely be cartoon related, as I really do miss the cartoons of my childhood.
After having a wonderful time chatting it up with Silas Weir Mitchell of Grimm last week (check the screenshot of me doing my thing), my week got infinitely better as I was approached by the beautiful social media team at Starz’s new original series Da Vinci’s Demons to receive some gear.
For those of you completely unaware of what the show is about, it’s basically a re-imagining of the world renowned artist, sculptor, scientist and all-around genius that is Leonardo Da Vinci. At first, I wasn’t too sure about it (mainly because DD airs the same time as Grimm did — Friday nights at 9 PM — before Grimm moved to Tuesdays), but after watching the first three episodes back-to-back-to-back, I got into it. I even started following the Da Vinci’s Demons Twitter account and would engage with other watchers/followers and say the random odd thing.
As usual, I didn’t expect anyone to really give two craps about what I thought, until this happened:
Yeah. They followed me. That ACTUALLY happened.
That’s only ever happened once before, and that was with Starz’s Camelot (which I’m still mourning by the way). Any how, it looks like DD liked the fact that I engaged with them because they’d re-tweet or favorite my tweets.
Next thing I know, either a day or two after my live chat with Silas, DD DMs me, thanks me for my support and asks for my address to send some gear. Naturally, I was like:
So I send them my information, and for a while, I thought that they probably forgot about me until my brother-in-law hands me a parcel that he mistook for a package for my sister. Like a giddy schoolgirl, I opened it up and looked at my swag:
I got a t-shirt with the words “Arrogant Visionary Bastard” written across the front and the DD logo in the back with the Vitruvian Man in the upper corner, along with two tweed satchels to hold stuff in (like they do on the show) and a cardboard container housing some really cool wooden pencils, cleverly constructed cardboard pens, and a wooden sharpener.
They also sent me a letter (albeit generic, but still a nice one) saying:
“Hi Alj,
Thanks for following and engaging with us on Twitter! We hope you’re enjoying Da Vinci’s Demons and plan to tune-in every Friday at 9pm EST on Starz.
Here is some great gear we think you’ll enjoy. Keep following the conversation on @DaVincis_Starz and please @mention us and include the hastag #DaVincisDemons. We look forward to your tweets about the show!
Your friends at Da Vinci’s Demons”
So I look at it and go:
“Is all of this is for me, just for being a good fan?”
Well then, let the fangirling continue!!
Of course, I made sure to let my new friends at Da Vinci’s Demons know how thankful I was for the gift and they were just too kind to respond back!
Before, I thought fangirling was just a lost cause — especially since I’ve been a fan to countless shows without any kind of recognition what-so-ever. But at the same time, tons of other people are fans too, so why should they acknowledge me? Now, I have renewed hope in my fanatical endeavors. And who knows maybe this little token might show up on my doorstep the next time:
I know, I know, it won’t happen. But hopefully that little meat puppet that is Tom Riley will respond to one of my tweets. Then I’ll finally know that he knows I exist, and I can run around screaming
As always guys, click on the links because they are active and don’t forget to check out Da Vinci’s Demons on Fridays at 9 PM.
Con Amor,
-Alja
I completed The Left Hand of Darkness with about 7 days left in the month to go, achieving my first goal of finishing the epic sci-fi novel before the end of May.
As I mentioned before, the book is slightly dense, and the hardest yet most endearing part of the book dealt with the journey of the two main characters, Genly and Estraven, across this massive ice land. I didn’t think I would make it through, much like the characters. But I did. And when I made it through with them, it was a quick succession of events that ended with me being very teary-eyed. I may have shed a tear or two.
So … what did I take from the book?
1. To Push Beyond the Envelope
If it’s one thing that Ursula definitely does throughout most of this novel, it’s making you think. From the introduction to the end of the book, this woman had my brain working overtime. First she gives me an an androgynous/sexless/hermaphroditic society, then he poses questions about the consequences of equality, and then she talks about the duality of a person, while weaving in all these sociological and political undertones. It was like:
2. To Make a Story Rich
TLHOD had a lot of vocabulary. At one point I thought I was straight out stupid because I didn’t know half of the words in this book. Then I realized that she made them up! And used them so flawlessly in between actual words that I couldn’t tell the difference. And of course, her story was made all the richer for it because her world was complete with its own words to describe its culture
and last but not least…
3. Don’t Be Afraid of a Long Tale
As I previously mentioned before, I only got into TLHOD after hearing it mentioned in a movie I watched a while back. It was only after I started reading the book, did I learn that it was a part of a larger tale. One of my fears it to have a story that’s really now and not interesting, but sometimes it does take several tales (sometimes even different ones that interweave in and out) to tell a story, or make it more interesting. Not to mention, I loved the way Ursula changed her narration between scientific findings, to the point of view of one character to the legend of a group people to the point of view of another character for the same event.
That’s about it for now. Oh, I’ve also started on book 12 of 13 in the Sookie Stackhouse Novels (aka the True Blood books) called Deadlock.
After this book, it’s Dead Ever After and then we can say goodbye to all the characters that I’ve grown to hate, dislike, loathe, can’t stand, and love. However, I did read somewhere that we can apparently expect an epilogue novel with a follow-up of all the main characters. *shrugs*
Con Amor,
-Alja
Hello ALL!
First, I apologize for my absence. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on another project of mine which I was hoping to do a little bit better with all the energy that I’ve been putting into it. Now that the hardest part is over, I’m turning some of my attentions back to WRITING.
Now, back to reality: NANOWRIMO! Continue reading
She came over to my apartment, and I couldn’t help but feel a little anxious. We’d been dating for some weeks and I have to admit that I really like her. I’ve always liked her really. I’d known her for a while, but just never really had the nerve to ask her on a date. When I did, we hit things off so well that it only made sense to keep dating. When she kissed me, I knew that I didn’t want to stop kissing her. And the way she looked at me – some kind of twinkle in her eye, biting her bottom lips and a blush on her cheeks – just only reassured me that I was right to ask her out again. Continue reading
AljaTheWriter 