BONNIE BURTON: My name is Bonnie
Burton, and I'm a writer.
Primarily, I do nonfiction kids' books, including The
Star Wars Craft Book.
Well, I always love anything sci-fi, so luckily, I was
doing a lot of Star Wars crafts on the side, and I got
to talk to Random House and other publishers, and they
were cool with me doing Star Wars crafts and basically
charging them for my googly eye budget, my glitter budget.
So I've been doing a lot of craft tutorials at different
conventions and different things like that.
So people already knew that I was kind of the go-to person
for turning a sock into a Chewbacca sock puppet.
But I also wrote a Mean Girls book, which isn't really a
tutorial on how to be a mean girl.
It's basically a book on how to deal with mean girls in
your life and how not to become one.
It's geared towards teenage girls, but I've noticed that
more and more of my guy friends are reading it to
understand their wives.
I was both a mean girl and bullied by mean girls.
I think it's hard to be just one or the other.
I was bullied by mean girls all the time.
I had braces at an early age.
I was a geek.
I was a nerd.
I loved all the stuff that nerds and geeks like.
But there weren't any other geek girls anywhere in my zip
code, and so I'd get bullied quite a bit by that.
And then I had a younger brother.
So by default, you become a mean girl when you have a
younger brother to play with and manipulate, and I was
really bad about that, and hopefully, one day he'll
forgive me.
I grew up on a farm in Kansas originally.
And I identified with Luke Skywalker probably more than
most girls should, because I felt like I was kind of
trapped on a farm myself, and I wanted to go out and have
adventures.
But I loved Star Wars so much that I actually got some of
the toys before I saw the film.
So I was acting out and doing little role playing things
with my action figures.
So by the time I saw the film, I had made a giant role for
Boba Fett, giant roles for all these different characters
that basically have one line of dialogue, if
nothing, in Star Wars.
So I kind of felt like I was a TV writer or screenwriter even
when I was a little kid.
But you get bored on the farm.
Sometimes you'd squint into the distance and look at a
combine and pretend it's an AT-AT.
So that's how my mind worked.
And I constantly would go into phone booths, too, and pretend
it was a TARDIS for Doctor Who, or I would put Play-Doh
on my ears and pretend I was Spock's
younger spunkier sister.
So I always had some sci-fi playing out.
And my first crush was Apollo on Battlestar Galactica.
I don't really consider myself a gamer.
I play board games, and I play really old school Atari games.
But as far as grabbing a gun and obliterating all my
friends, at least in the board game realm, I don't think
about that.
Maybe in meetings or something I do, but as far as just
actually being a hard-core gamer with a headset and
everything, that's too many things to worry about.
I want to say gaming is liberating because you get to
be someone else.
You get to have fun.
There's no real consequences.
If you kill someone, you're not going to
hauled off to jail.
If you double or triple cross or quadruple cross your
friends, they actually have more respect for you after,
and they think you're being intelligent.
And yeah, you might be a little seedy in the triple
cross, but you've gained their respect.
If you did it in real life, you'd be out on your ass, and
you wouldn't get a Christmas card.
So to me it feels like it could be liberating.
You could be a villain.
You could be a total slut.
You could be really creepily violent, and you can get away
with it and still keep your friends at the end of the day,
where in real life, you can't really do that.
So I think it's liberating.
