In this ongoing article series, each month I highlight my fellow bloggers who are working hard to provide news, reviews and coverage on the entertainment world.
This month’s spotlight is on Lucia Giusti, who runs Heroine TV. Lucia is a Ph.D. candidate in History, studying imperial women in ancient Rome with the goal of becoming a college professor once she finishing writing her dissertation.
Television is a fun escape for her from the rigors of academic life and her blog – Heroine TV – has become her favorite past time. But it wasn’t until 2003 when she graduated from college that she moved from being just a casual TV viewer to a much more in-depth TV aficionado. During her two year break between college and grad school, she became hooked on shows like Gilmore Girls, Felicity and Alias thanks to the advent of the DVD. You could say that her television obsession was born out of that time because she began to voraciously read blogs for television news and recaps, especially the writings at Television Without Pity.
It was during her time in graduate school that she got hooked on the TV series Lost, which started her on the path of following TV news even more closely and listening to podcasts. It was through these podcasts that she learned about the short-lived series Firefly – for which she fell madly in love – and this led to marathon viewings of Buffy and Angel, causing her fall “ever more in love with Whedon’s writing”.
Lucia believes it was because she became a Whedon fan that inspired her to start blogging, because, “I really just became so passionate about television through his shows”. She wanted an outlet for this passion, but, at the time, wasn’t sure what to do, as she hadn’t considered herself a writer – except in terms of her academic career. In fact, the concept of Heroine TV originally started out as a podcast with Lucia trying to figure out a format that would allow her to talk about all the shows that she loved while still maintaining some type of focus. She soon opted out of the podcast format, settling on writing a blog instead.
In September of 2008 she began a LiveJournal blog, and even though she had no idea what she was doing, the blog became an increasingly bigger and bigger part of her life. It was in July of 2009 that she moved her content over to WordPress, which was a much better platform for her purposes. The rest, as you could say, is history: with Heroine TV taking on a life of its own with a lot of help from the world of Twitter for building a readership not to mention creating new friendships.
She has become involved with podcasts through The Televixen website, which can be visited here, focusing on The Vampire Diaries TV series, over the past year and has had the opportunity to write for Buffyfest and Vampire-Diaries.net.
While maintaining a regular posting schedule at her blog and juggling her academic schedule can be tricky, Lucia has managed to write recaps for Lost, Dollhouse, and Mad Men in the past; and more recently all the episodes of The Vampire Diaries. She recently started a series of retro recaps; with the first installment being a recap of the Buffy pilot. She hopes to continue to post recaps of key episodes from her favorite past series (listed here) on a regular basis while still writing about her current favorite shows as time permits.
And, she did finally start a podcast (after all) with assistance from her Francesca last summer, talking about such shows as Pretty Little Liars, True Blood, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and Greek. It’s available to listen on her site or via iTunes.
You can visit Lucia’s Heroine TV blog here and you can contact her at heroinetv@gmail.com.
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