HollySBlue3's Profile

Join Date:

11/14/2008

Pen Name: HollySBlue3

• Location: Houston, TX
• Name: Holly S. Blue         http://twitter.com/HollySBlue3   http://open.salon.com/blog/holly_blue
• Preferred language: English
• School:
• About me:

  My first name came from the Holly Golightly character in Truman Capote's 'Breakfast At Tiffany's', & from the musician Buddy Holly. My middle name is Seymour. Yes, Seymour.
   I was named after a character in a J.D. Salinger novel. My last name, Blue, has two origins- the title character in Philippe Dijan's novel 'Betty Blue', & is a sort of homage to Bob Dylan ('Tangled Up In Blue', 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue', etc.).
  So I guess in a way being a writer is the only natural course I could take in life, seeing as it was literally spelled out for me from birth. My mother wanted to add on Sylvia - thus making my name Holly Seymour Sylvia Blue, but my father thought a name that long would be ridiculous. It's too bad though, because as fate would have it, Sylvia Plath (who would've been one of my namesake's had my father not been such a jerk about it) is my favorite poet & one of my favorite female writers. I feel this strange connection with her.
  When I was eleven I remember seeing her picture on the cover of her Unabridged Journals at a bookstore, & having no idea who she was, I picked up the book & asked my mother "who is this woman, Sylvia Plath, this poet? & Why did they give her electroshock?", she said "Yes, she was a poet, but how did you know about the -?" & I just said "Well you can see it in her eyes, it's like a tornado, the calm before the storm, it's all in her eyes. She killed herself, didn't she?", my mother just stared at me & after what seemed like forever said only "Yes."
  I did not get a copy of her Journals that day, my mother seemed a little spooked by my remarks & we left the store without buying anything; the first thing I read of Sylvia's was her poem "The Applicant". Then her novel "The Bell Jar", which I immediately regarded as a sort of feminine counterpoint to Salinger's 'The Catcher In The Rye' (which I read & wrote a quite in-depth paper on at nine years old, causing my English teacher to also start using the nickname given to me by my peers: Weird Girl).
  When I finally got my hands on & finished her Journals I was startled as it seemed that she was writing from a place within my deep inner-self, if that makes any sense. It was spooky reading, words familiar almost to the point of panic.
  Any-Way. Enough of this weirdness.
  I am a twenty year old girl (b. 6/10/88).
   I've been writing since I was seven, at twelve I came to the conclusion that I couldn't happily be anything other than a writer.
  Here are some random facts about me:
  ~ up until fourth grade I was under the impression that everyone knew who Lou Reed was.
  
  ~ by the time I was six years old I knew the entire "London Calling" record by The Clash note for note, word for word, & would apparently refer to it as "the sing along one", as in "I want to listen to the sing along one now, mother."
  
  ~ I am a gemini, & I take great pleasure in the fact that I am in very good company:
  Johnny Depp, Bob Dylan, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Helena Bonham-Carter, Gene Wilder, Angelina Jolie, Allen Ginsberg, Alanis Morissette, Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Nancy Sinatra, Isabella Rossellini, Bill Hader, Vincent Price, & Igor Stravinsky.
  
  ~ Instead of a ballerina or a princess, I wanted to be Keith Richards when I grew up.
  
  ~ I was born three months premature, I had a nine percent chance (out of one-hundred) of living.
  ~ I have a small scar on my chin from falling on the fairy when I was two in NYC.
  
  ~ when I was three I bit my tongue completely in half. by accident, of course. I was running to a carrousel; I still have an unnatural fascination with old-fashioned circuses - carrousels, knife-throwing, ringleaders, that weird tinny music. imagery that shows up a lot in my writing.
  
  ~ I wrote a letter to Tim Burton when I was three years old after seeing Edward Scissorhands (that's when my deep admiration & respect for Winona Ryder started, & when I fell in love with Johnny Depp). I do not know if he ever received it or not.
  
  ~ I have an almost unnatural draw to comedy (sketch, in particular), I hold comedians in far higher regard than I probably should.
  
  ~ if I were a boy I would pursue comedy... or be a musician ala David Bowie, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Kurt Cobain, Peter Doherty.
  
  ~ When I was a baby my godfather Mark would sing 'This Year's Girl' by Elvis Costello to me to get me to sleep, apparently it was for quite a while the only tune that worked.
  
  ~ I am of French & American Indian(Cherokee) descent.
  
  ~I have a mortal fear of clowns, people with hooks for hands, getting my ankles slashed open, & that I will not ever be published in my lifetime.
  
  ~ my favorite superhero is Batman, & my favorite villain of all time is The Joker.
  
  I was born and raised in Houston, TX, and still live there. My parents got divorced when I was six - drunken father - and I have a younger sister, she's 17 and is currently attending Westchester Academy of International Studies. My mother is a NYIT graduate and works as a ninth grade English teacher.
  When I was fourteen I was accepted to University of Houston but did not attend due to health problems. I attended Westchester Academy of International Studies for a while, publishing five poems in their literary magazine.
  I removed myself from all organized learning structures at seventeen because I felt it would be more productive if I had the ability, the freedom, to create my own scholarly itinerary.
  The central focus of my studies was on literature, though I also devoted a lot of my time to the areas of political science, art (painting, drawing, acting, film making, photography, modeling, playing guitar & piano,etc.), psychiatry, journalism and philosophy.
  I wrote my first poem at fourteen and by the time I was sixteen had over twenty good poems, but thought nothing of it. Just before I turned eighteen I knew I was writing the real thing, actual poetry, and have written over one hundred real live crashing poems since then.

• My claim to fame: You know, I do hope that before I die I will have more of a claim to fame than as the high school libertine rebel with a cause girl.
   Any-Way.
  During my short stint in high school I attained celebrity; the thing that still makes me giggle is that I wasn't consciously doing anything out of the ordinary for me, I was just being myself & that apparently garnered me cult status: I dressed how I wanted, wore my make-up the way I wanted, questioned authority, I read, said, did, & listened to "smart, strange" things... I mean, I literally had followers, fans, every freaking person at that school knew who I was & they either loved me or loathed me - there were ones who would leave me be but still everyone had an opinion of me. One day at lunch a girl ran over to me in the courtyard & asked for a picture. I had two stalkers (who were not so polite when it came to actually ASKING to take pictures of me), & during my last weeks there a very preppy blonde valley girl came up to me & in very revered tones thanked me for standing up to "the higher-ups", & actually called me a Libertine. I was shocked & quite flattered, but mostly shocked that how I was (& am still) was that shocking to some people.
   I was, well the only way to put it is I was famous, or rather infamous, became a sort of folk legend, a myth, in less than two years. The rumor that I enjoyed the most was that Tim Burton was my godfather. I loved that! & also legend has it that I was a junkie (who shot up with Courtney Love, seriously, you would think they would at least take in age as a factor when coming up with these rumors), a French coke-head model who fled France & was "running from the law" on the lam for "serious premeditated crime shit", related to Winona Ryder, a vampire...
  It was hysterical before it got to the point where my friend Amanda told me I reminded her of "Johnny Depp in the nineties when he went all ballistic & trashed that hotel because it was just all too much, man, the pressure,man.", & warned me to not go all batshit on these people.
  So about two & a half months before the end of tenth grade I just walked out.
  They were going to expel me anyway.