BEDA #8: Question Tuesday!

Best and worst thing about being a ginger?
The worst thing is definitely the sun burns! I spend 15 minutes in the sun and I turn the color of a tomato, and I'm only slightly exaggerating!
The best thing is probably all of the people telling my how much they love the color of my gorgeous auburn puff. It happens at least a couple of times a week and it's usually little old ladies.
Funny story: when I was very young, 3-5 years old I think, my mom took me tot he grocery store and a couple of nuns came up to me to tell me that they loved my hair, and in response I did an impression of a T-Rex, my favorite dinosaur, by rawring at them like a T-Rex and putting up my fingers like claws and that freaked them out. (This also relates to what job I wanted when I was a kid, which I'll come back to in a sec.)

How is your Nanowrimo story going?
Not as well as I'd like. I have only 2100 words right now... Encouragement? :)

What are your hobbies?
I like writing, obviously otherwise I'd be even more crazy to subject myself to Nanowrimo, but I also really like to watch the show Arrow. It's really good.

Pie or Cake?
Cake! Though it's got to be dairy free.


What was your least favorite subject in high school?
My least favorite subject in high school was math, but specifically Algebra 2/Trig. I had a horrible teacher who thought I was insubordinate and who refused to give me any help when I was floundering in her class because I was "passive-aggressive." I had a 504 which was a documented physical disability, which allowed me to get extra time on tests and she refused to let me get extra time, so I was failing her tests because I wasn't finishing them, until I got retested to make sure I actually needed it (Spoiler alert: after several multi-hour tests on weekends, we figured out that my fine motor skill issues didn't fix themselves). Then after that she treated me like I was a toddler who couldn't understand English. It was humiliating, so yeah. I hated that class and I didn't particularly enjoy math to begin with.

Weirdly, I didn't enjoy English classes very much until my senior year of high school and college. Just goes to show you that things change!


What was the first thing you remember ever wanting to be when you grew up?
I desperately wanted to become a paleontologist when I was five. I knew everything there was to know about dinosaurs and I had watched all the documentaries ever made on dinosaurs. Jurassic Park then scared the crap out of me in the first thirty seconds. I still wanted to be a paleontologist for a while, but I eventually lost almost all of my knowledge about dinosaurs sadly.

Super hero or Super villain?

THOR! ... ahem. Superhero. :)

CDSM #2: Why I'm Afraid and How I Intend to Deal with It

I'll be honest with you guys.

I'm terrified.

Why, you ask?

Most people will tell you straight away they're afraid because they don't have a plan. That scares me too, but I have another, greater fear.

I have a plan.

I have a plan and I'm scared because of it.

I have anxiety problems and because there is so much I want to do, often it triggers the deep fear within that I won't finish what I want to do, or worse, what I'm meant to do. You see, I'm one of those people who has irrational fears out the wazoo, one of them being unable to complete the creative projects I want to because either I just stink at getting things onto the page, or fear of being judged by people who read my work, or because I just die before I finish what I want to (irrational, I know).

Criticism is tough to accept without taking it heart, and I really have to get better about that. For example, I was talking to a friend about an aspect of a story I am working on, and she told me that the story was unoriginal because she had read a book once that had a vaguely similar concept in it.

Being called unoriginal is pretty much the most damning criticism in the artistic world, and after that incident, I have been going through a major dry spell in my ability to write. I can hear the inner critic whispering words in my ears.

"You're not good enough."

"You've never been recognized for your writing."

"You'll never finish anything worth anyone's time and money."

"You're unoriginal."

The voice inside my head won't let me write, or rather, it makes me afraid to write my story, and I keep myself silent.

But I've come to an important realization.

The story that is inside me is important. I can't let fear stop me.

Sure, my story's plot is convoluted, long and complicated, but that doesn't matter. I have to write it. I know I do. I can't let myself be silenced by anyone, most of all myself and my fears and anxieties. It's a feeling deep in my gut. It's an aching pain that seeps into my mind when I'm not working on it. A pain so great it feels like it will crush my spine from on high, and when I do think about it or work on it, it's like a poison being extracted slowly from my system. A wonderful poison, but a poison all the same.

That is how I know my work is worthwhile.

So here's what I'm going to do in my next post: I'm going to tell you a bit about the story and you can tell me what you think. Then I'm going to keep on writing no matter what you say! ;)

But to give you a little preview: I have always been fascinated by the Greek gods, and now I'm combining them with aspects of Plato's philosophy and cosmology and throwing them into a science fiction universe (multiverse) of my own creation.

But something is preying on the gods across the boundaries of time and space...


Let me know what you think, and also if you have had similar experiences of fear of your creative works!

100th post! Also Stuff I Like to Do

Woo! 100 posts! Congratulations everyone!

In other news, I have two activities that I want to talk about today: writing and D&D which I guess is actually an extension of just hanging out with friends, but I digress.

Writing for me is the most wonderful torturous way to spend a day. I love to create stories and characters in my head. I do it all the time when I'm in cities. I like to sit and watch total strangers walk by and make up stories for who they might be based on just examining their demeanor and their clothes. It's fun, but writing is hard work. I have trouble getting my words on the page without filtering them through my perfectionist mind.

I often get asked why I write. I get exasperated looks when I tell people that I want to be an author. I tell them that I don't write because I want fame or to be rich. I don't write because I think it will bring me eternal glory. I write for two reasons. The first is that I can't imagine what I would do if I stopped writing. I love to create, like I said.

The second is that I want to make a difference, even if my writing makes only one person a bit happier. That's enough for me.

Ok the third reason is because most of my idols are authors and I want to follow in their footsteps. Can you imagine how awesome it would be to write sentences like John Green? Not exactly like his, because that'd be stealing, but you know what I mean.


D&D has been a part of my life since elementary school and it's how I've met most of my best friends who I will cherish for the rest of my life. Plus it's my favorite game ever. It's even better than Skyrim, which is practically blaspheme.

A Post About Nothing, and Everything (Also a love story))

First of all: 4000 views! Wow!

Yeah... sorry I didn't post last week. I had a 15-20 page research paper on Plato's Demiurge, the Bacchic cults and the Greek gods. It ate my life last week. I'm back now though!

Now, on to my post for last week (my post for this week will be up in a couple of days), which will be about a short story I wrote for my girlfriend around Valentine's Day. Yes, it's a love story, but hopefully it's not too much of a "love story" if you know what I mean. Let me know what you think!

Bits of Stardust

Her leg twitched slightly, brushing up against his. His hand rose and fell with her stomach, the cotton fibers an ocean of purple on which his palm floated. Her arm twitched again and punched his bicep involuntarily. She was a boxer in her sleep. He grinned at the sweet look on her face, her eyes fluttering wildly under the lids and her mouth slightly open. Her body expelled a cloud of deadly carbon dioxide gas through her jungle of bed head hair. His hand sunk into the ocean as her stomach dove.

His body rarely allowed him to sleep in late nowadays. He had woken near dawn, but could not bring himself to wake her. He had contented himself to lie beside her, she in his arms and him in hers.

The fabric of her pajamas ran across leg again, pushing aside his and grazing his leg hairs. He clenched his teeth and desperately tried to keep himself from crying out with laughter and flailing his whole body. He did not want to wake her. He tensed his body until the tickling stopped. God, why did he have to be so ticklish?

His other arm rested behind her head, his fingers just inches from her neck. They begged him to give them free reign on the open fields of skin. He reluctantly held them back, secretly longing to touch her soft skin. Caress the skin, the tiny hairs she hates to admit cover her body. Treat her as if God himself handcrafted her body and gave her to him to keep safe and unblemished. Make love to her skin with his hand.

The pressure of her body on his arm’s arteries caused his arm to scream for air. How could he remove his arm without disturbing her? Carefully, he slipped his arm free of its prison. Inch by inch, more of his arm cried out in thanks as it began to breathe freely again.

He was almost free, his wrist sliding through the tunnel of neck and pillow, when a piece of dust flew up his nose. Pressure built in his nasal cavity. His hand jerked slightly as he plugged his nose with the other. She stirred. For a moment, he sat there, heart pounding like a drum solo. She sighed. He took a short breath. She rolled over onto her side and off his hand. The sneeze faded away.

The boy sat with his book of blank pages and began to write. He wrote every day. Otherwise, his work would never be finished, and would still be unfinished when he returned to the dust of stars that made him.

After finishing, he gazed back over to her, peaceful and quiet. He saw the love in the look of her closed eyes.

He felt the familiar twinge in his chest. He had a headache.

He grabbed a cup and filled it with water from the bathroom sink. He brought it back and stood by the bed. A single ray of morning sunlight broke through the window shades. It crawled up the side of her head, just barely walking across her face. He held the cup too loosely in his hand and water spilled over the edge, onto her shoulder, chest and neck. He froze.

Her eyes blinked open once, twice, three times before she turned and saw him. A smile made of granny-smith apples and maple syrup played across her face.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. She grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to her lips.

Women in charge were hot.

Dust and boxes, that’s all that was in the attic. Her cat meowed at the door. The girl, crippled by time’s embrace as she now was, opened the door to the room of forgotten memories. “What’s in here, Beethoven?”

The cat waltzed into the room as if he owned the place. He ran to a stack of boxes and began to rub his side against one of them. The woman reached for the box, but her hand shook with the effort and the box fell to the ground. “Beethoven, look at what you’ve made me do,” she said sarcastically. She bent to pick up the box, but stopped when Beethoven meowed again, impatiently.

The cat jumped into the hole between the boxes. “Beethoven!” She tried to move some of the boxes to get to the cat, but he jumped back out, an old book clasped in his mouth. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, silly cat!” Beethoven dropped the book at her feet and purred proudly.

The woman picked up the book. She had never seen it before. Curious, she opened to the first page. She recognized the meticulously handwritten print, though she had not seen it in many years. In her mind, she read his words in his deep, slow voice.

“Love is a story of two. Two actors perform on a stage, for all to see, but never know. Two members sit in the audience, whose minds’ council never uttered. No one else can understand their love story. They only see a shadow playing across their eyes and guess at its wonders. For the story contains no words, no great epics nor ballads, only memories of lost moments in a sea of emotion and forgotten dreams. Such is life; life, the story of love.”

The woman sat and read his thoughts from days in their youth, until they parted and he wrote on alone, but always for her. She read without pause, until the final page and the final passage.

“I grow weary, love, though I have enjoyed sharing our memories with you. I can barely write now, I must be growing old. Keep this book of no words. I wrote it for you, us, our memories. I’m moving to a new place soon. It’s considerably smaller than my apartment, but it’s in the country and there’s acres of grass for us to lay in. I would really like to see you. I know many leagues and years separate us, but I would like to see you again. I have missed you all these years.”

The woman choked on her own tears. She had seen him, many times in the past years; the first time on a trip to see her mother.

Hours later she knelt by his home. His tomb was not made of marble or gold, but of earth and the dust of stars. She laid a bit of mistletoe on the stone above him, mistletoe he had given her as a Christmas present so many lifetimes ago.

“Oh, look, love,” she said, “mistletoe.” She bent and kissed him, sucking on his lips until they were red and bruised.

She read the engraving at the bottom of the stone, which he wrote in a notebook of words he never meant to publish. “There is no life in this universe but that of stars, and we, in all our wanderings and pains, are no exception. We are all, every atom, every molecule, and every soul, not but stardust shining in the void of space, and some shine brighter than us all; glittering in every atom there ever was or ever shall be.”

She rose and atoms coalesced around her, embracing her, kissing her, making love to her skin. She melted into his fingers again. Two stars, made one, shining brighter than all the rest. No one but the universe saw them, and no else could understand.

© 2012 Matthew Elkin

Hi! (Matthew's Introductory post)

Hey everybody!

My name is Matthew (or Matt, that’s what my friends call me, so you can call me Matt J) and I’m 21 years old. I’m from New Hampshire in the United States, but most of my high school years my family and I lived on a military base on Kwajalein, an island in the Marshall Islands. We’re not a military family my dad just got a job out there. If you have no clue where that the Marshall Islands are, they’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. My family moved back to the US about a year and a half ago.

Right now, I’m a student at Knox College in the state of Illinois. I’m in my third year of college, junior year, and I’m studying philosophy primarily with a side focus on history and religious studies. I’ve also taken creative writing classes.

Why study philosophy, history and religious studies? I love to think and imagine. I enjoy thinking about philosophical issues and how they relate to ethics, politics, history and religious beliefs. Knox is also a small school and I really love it.

I’m a writer. I hope to become an author someday (John Green is a huge inspiration to me). I’m currently working on a fantasy novel/series about a boy named Aaron and his sister Katrina that is based heavily on the Norse myth of Ragnarok, but it’s still my own interpretation and it’s not a carbon copy of the original myth. I also have tons of other ideas I want to work on. Haha.

I also run another blog, probably not as faithfully as I should, but anyway… if you want to look at that go here: http://dmmaster42.wordpress.com/ . I wrote a review of The Fault in Our Stars which you might particularly enjoy.

Some of the things I like to do when I’m not thinking about or talking/debating about philosophy with friends or writing: Watching online videos: Vlogbrothers and Yugioh the Abridged series are my two favorites, but Scishow, Crashcourse, and Hankgames are right up there as well. I read a lot, mostly fantasy and sci-fi but I do read other genres as well. I loved The Fault in Our Stars of course. I watch the news a lot but I also love a lot of TV shows and movies. I’m obsessed with Doctor Who and Merlin! I listen to music a lot while I work (lots of Hank Green songs of course!). I play video games. I also do a lot of role-playing, mostly D&D probably my favorite activity apart from writing. Other than that I love just spending time with my friends and girlfriend, who is also a nerdfighter (yay for nerdfighterlike!).

Things I dislike: Anything to do with increasing world-suck, serious arguments and tension, and rap.

Random facts about me: I’m ginger and left-handed.

I think that’s pretty much it about me for now. Welcome to this new blog! I’m really excited about it and can’t wait to see it grow and get the chance to get to know you and lots more nerdfighters. So have a great day and, as always, DFTBA!

Matthew