Here I am. A fresh start!
It’s another geeky feminist blog – a voice to add to the masses. Most blogs have a bit of navel-gazing at the beginning, but I’m going to offer up a bit about this blog’s name.
Starlight Geek
Well, first of all, I went through several dozen names and variations before coming up with “Starlight Geek.” Most of the names I liked were already taken – usually by placeholder sites, of course, with no actual content. At a very late hour last night, I started looking around my room for inspiration, like a kid playing Mad Libs. I looked over my bookcases, in particular the one that houses all my Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings (and all the other Tolkien works), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy compendium, and all of my Star Wars novels. I mused over coming up with a word in Quenya or maybe an obscure Harry Potter spell as a name, but dismissed the idea.
Wedged between The Princess Bride and The Phantom Tollbooth sat a Christopher Pike book called The Starlight Crystal. It’s not one of his horror stories that I devoured as a death-obsessed middle schooler, but instead one of his sci-fi books. It’s full of the most dramatic purple prose, but I can’t deny that it appealed to me at that age. It’s a very cyclical story, with not-quite time travel, predestined love separated by the universe, and some lovely deus ex machina. But even with all of its overly floral writing and the occasional one-sentence chapters, I still enjoy it at the ripe age of 30.
So, the name “Starlight Geek” floated into my mind. I bounced the idea off J., who liked it because it suggested the nocturnal nature of many geeks like ourselves. It also, of course, has a sci-fi feel to it. Finally, it’s a simple reference to my love of amateur astronomy. No matter how tired or frustrated or angry I am, I can step outside and – assuming it’s not too cloudy – look up at the stars. It provides some perspective.
And believe me, sometimes we all need a little perspective.