Hi, my name is Heather, and I'm a geek....

So, according to one of my facebook event reminders, today is 'Celebrate Your Geekness Day'. A while back there was a thread started on a forum that I frequent asking who got us into scifi… which got me thinking about the origins of my interest in it.

The truth is, I can't really pin it down to one person or event or movie that triggered my love of scifi and fantasy. Looking back, I've always had a love of the fantastic. I was the kid who stayed up late and read books about unicorns and dragons under the blankets by flashlight. Later (between 7 and 12ish), I would sneak out of bed and watch movies like The Terminator and RoboCop with the volume turned down so I wouldn't wake my parents.

When I hit college, I started getting seriously into comics and found myself becoming more of a Marvel girl than DC. My love was speficially the X-Men. I've always loved the idea that there was a group of people who were outsiders, feared and reviled by the rest of the world, yet they chose to use their abilities to help people rather than hurt them.

To me, that was an incredibly potent brew and it reacted a bit like nitroglycerin with my imagination. You see, that's the point when I started creating stories and writing them down, mostly revolving around these powerful and misunderstood heroes. My mother read one of my stories and that prompted her to suggest that I take a creative writing course… and the rest is history.

This is an incredible time to be a geek. We've seen an Oscar go to a film adaptation of a seminal work of fantasy literature (yes, I know they cheesed it by calling Return of the King as historic fiction, but it still won), we've seen fantastic adaptations of some of our favorite comics (Iron Man, Batman, the X-men, Spider-Man), and scifi and fantasy are more accessible than ever before.

I'm hopeful that we can keep this ball rolling with upcoming adaptations of Captain America, the Avengers, a new Superman to look forward to, and others. There are some who bemoan the loss of this 'exclusive' little club that used to be geekdom, but I'm not one of them. Gaining a wider audience for our favorite things just means more willingness in the entertainment industry to accept more great stories.

Viva la geek!