Biography

I suppose you, as a most curious reader, visited this page simply because you want to learn more about the person behind the website, the obnoxious and egocentric author behind the well-stated opinions and fancy quotes used in the weblog. I may have to dissapoint you, since I am far from being the interesting creature I pretend to be. As a matter of fact, my life up till now has been quite ordinary – some more adventurous people might even call it boring – and only every now and then has it lifted itself from that undesirable state to new, unexplored heights. Let me begin by sketching for you the most important moment of my entire twenty-year old life: my birth. I was born during the most terrible storm known to man kind, in a castle hidden deep within the woods, the hour close to midnight. Unfortunately, the dissapointment begins here already: I was born around 5 o’clock in the morning, in a hospital like every good ol’ John Doe, and if I believe my mother words on it, the weather was nice and warm, like it normally is in July. Although, perhaps it should be fair to say that my birth, in all honesty, was nothing short but a miracle. My parents had remained childless for over twenty years – my mother never got pregnant until she was expecting me – and an army of doctors had already informed my parents it was a probability that I would not survive it. But I did, fighting and struggling, and with a bit of luck on my part, of course.

My parents chose a most unusual name for their little baby, Majanka. The name is uncommon, but now and then I do come across people (okay, fine, only once…) who share the name with it. I grew up happily and very much loved, in the house I currently still live in, until at age seven I discovered the meaning of tragedy, loss, pain and death, when my father passed away. He was the best dad in the entire world. Long before any teacher tried their hand at teaching me how to read – only to discover I could already read fluently – my dad had sat me down on his lap, carefully opened the cover of a novel and travelled with me to Wonderland, or sailed with me to the fascinating worlds described in Gulliver’s Travels, together we had stolen from the rich and given to the poor in the trail of legendary hero Robin Hood and we had dined at the round table of King Arthur. After my dad died, there were many more worlds I discovered, but none seemed as mesmerizing or as amazing as they did when my father still travelled with me. Perhaps that is also an essential part of growing up: even for the children with the most vivid imagination, all fantasy worlds loose their charms while growing up. I was a bright child, and things like reading or mathematics came almost natural to me. Although I had a lot of friends at school, I found the classes quite boring and soon enough, while the others were struggling to solve mathematical questions or to spell longer words correctly, I was taking classes at Hogwarts with none other than the great Harry Potter, I was running through the forests of the night with creatures like vampires, werewolves and witches and I met a girl who could have been my twin – Mathilda, the famous character created by Roald Dahl.

Perhaps it is logical that an only child has a lot of imagination – half the time I didn’t have any friends to play with, so I made up my own stories and played them with my dolls and other toys. But my true passion wasn’t playing, or socializing, or playing the clarinet – a hobby I practised from age seven till my eighteenth birthday, nor was it reading books or fantasizing about my own fantasy worlds. My true passion was, is, and always will be writing. Heroes and heroines are often born to do something in particular – save the world, for example – but I truelly believe I was born to become an author. I was born to write. I breathe words, I dream sentences, I imagine paragraphs and I create characters. Continuously. Every new day comes with a new idea and new inspiration. Taken the train to the other side of the country – an adventure novel-worthy. A beautiful morning in spring can only be described in pages and pages filled with beautiful, poetic words. Sometimes it feels as if writing runs through my blood, as if it the inspiration burns painfully in my veins, until I finally get down and start typing, until I open a vein and bleed.

Writing has always stayed a part of my life, although the amount of time spent writing dropped dramatically when I entered puberty and only relived now I’m at university. In all fairness, I was a tough child to raise once I reached my teenage years. My will was very strong, my stubbornness without limits and my behaviour below all standards. It is not something I am proud of, nor like to be reminded of. Wrong friends, wrong values, and most of all the desire to start a revolution when one is not needed, a mind that is more rebellious than anything else and the constant struggle between adulthood and childhood. Life wasn’t particularly easy for me easy. When my grandmother suffered a stroke, my Mom and I (bust mostly me, since my mother suffered from severe depression in those days) were left to take care of my handicapped aunt who had been living in with my grandmother. By nature, I am not a very social person nor a very patient one – stupid, ignorant people annoy me – and although I hate to admit it, but the constant repeating of sentences by my aunt was as much of an annoyment to me as trying to explain to someone over and over how much one plus one is. My stress levels raised by a hundred, I was continuously worrying about my grandmother floating inbetween life and death, the pile of ununderstandable paper works on my desk was growing larger every day and all I really wanted was sleep.

It was in those dark, cold winter months that I learned the most important lesson of my life, something a teenager has trouble grasping – they often feel desperate and lost because they have not learned this yet – and that is that, against all odds, and even if you cannot see through the storm anymore, life always continous in a never-ending circle of good, bad, good, bad. Eventually all bad things end, life gets more relaxed, happiness returns and before you realise it, you are widely smiling while you’re running through the grass at sunrise. So like all things in life, my burden got less when my grandmother recovered – eventually enough to be able to live in a retirement home – and I found a place for my aunt to stay, a centre specialised in people with a mental handicap. My mother finally overcame her year-long depression (although she would frequently fall back to it in the future) and things at school got better too. Finally I had time to turn to my old hobbies again…And I did this with an unmatched passion. I wrote hours in a row and finished chapter after chapter, I eventually managed to read all books in the local library (which isn’t that small, mind you), I painted, sketched, and crafted. But one of my most favourite timepassers in those days – and even now still – was webdesign and coding.

The internet was a world I had only recently discovered, and it was a world most fascinating. The possibilities unfolded in front of my eyes, the information I had access to was incredible. I wanted nothing more than to be a part of this magnificence. So I put my long-time savings (hah, alright, so the little amount of cash I had saved from my birthday) into use and bought myself a year of hosting and my very own domain name, http://elvenmysteries.com. The years passed and my knowledge of coding languages such as HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL grew. I made the ‘big’ switch from Cutenews and several different php scripts to WordPress, and have since never looked back. All my sites requiring a CMS ever since have been created using WordPress. Since I figured that my old domain name no longer fit me, now I was leaving my teenage years behind and was slowly turning to look at the future, I switched hosts and domain name this year, the wonderful year of 2010. My new domain name, http://eternalised.net is much more a representive of me, of who I am and of who I hope to be one day. Read more about why I choose this particular domain name and its exact meaning.

Ever since I was old enough to think, apart from becoming a professional published author, I wanted to become world leader. It is a dream that has never left me since. At the moment, I’m studying law at university. I could give you detailed descriptions of how proud I was the first day I went to university (it was my fathers dream to go to university, and the fact that I could fulfill his dream meant the world to me) or how I can still feel shivers run down my spine when I enter the century-old university library and am surrounded by the masters of literature, from Charles Dickens to William Shakespeare, and the literary master pieces of all times, from Voltaire’s Candide to Conscience’s De Leeuw van Vlaanderen. I could also inform you of my great respect for professors and their never-ending thurst for knowledge, their insight and intelligence, or about drunken nights in student bars where the liquor never seems to stop flowing. I could tell you about how I wasted a lot of my talent – not to mention I destroyed an incredible amount of brain cells – by partying and drinking insane amounts of alcohol. But I won’t bore you with the details of my college life. Instead I will reveal to you my current day-to-day activities, to give you a small insight in my life nowadays.

I have always been a very busy person. I like being busy and having hobbies, and I am utterly incapable of just sitting or lying somewhere and staring at a ceiling. If I’m actually doing that, my brain is probably working overtime imagining new stories and interesting characters. Doing nothing is something I do not know, nor would like to know. Most of my time is of course spend studying, followed shortly by going out/sleeping. Furthermore, I write on this blog, I would like to work as a freelance webdesigner, reading, drawing, painting and other art forms – particularly photography has grasped my interest as of late – still take up a considerable amount of my spare time. But my newest, also quite time-consuming hobby is gaming. I like gaming, for me it’s the only form of mindless entertainment I practise. About a year ago, my boyfriend introduced me to World of Warcradft. Ever since, I play practically every day (although I do take some weeks off, since I go through these random periods of not wanting to be near a computer) and even though I occassionally try out other mmorpgs, such as Guildwars, Aion or Warhammer, nothing is more close to my heart than World of Warcraft. It’s just my thing. I occasionally blog about my adventures in the World of Warcraft too, in case you are interested.

Now you know quite some bit about my life history, and my huge list of hobbies, I can give you a clue of what sort of person I am, although I suspect you will have to gather more information through my weblog. I consider myself to be an intelligent human being, capable of contributing to a debate, or expressing my own opinion backed up by several logical arguements. Ambition is my greatest strive: I want to be the best at everything and anything, if possible. Additionally, I am also an insufferable perfectionist, and will edit my stories over and over again until they reach the perfection I demand – perhaps the most important reason of why I hardly ever finish a novel – and even when gaming, I strive to have the best possible gear, no matter how many times I have to do the same annoying thing in order to receive it. I’m studying law and hoping to become a successful lawyer one day, mostly because I have a strong sense of justice – if justice is harmed, I am willing to go beyond the impossible in order to fix the wrong-doing. Later in life, I want to practise politics because I am convinced, egocentric as I am – a typical example of the homo universalis – that I can change this world for the better. Towards my friends, I am outgoing and social, but at times I enter back into my self-made and carefully crafted shelter and hardly speak a word. Some days my emotions are running wild and all over the place, other times I feel as emotionless as a two hundred-year-old corpse burried deep in the catacombs of Paris. My friends claim I have a cynical, sarcastic sense of humor, but they do always laugh at my jokes, so I suspect they can appreciate my humor nevertheless. In a relationship, I can be quite dominant and I am convinced that I am always right, while my beloved is in 99% of the cases wrong. It probably doesn’t come to a surprise that I spend large amounts of my life being single, and most of my relationships are short-lived. However, my current boyfriend and I have been together for over a year now, so I must possess some special charm (that or the dark magic I cast in order to seduce him, actually worked!). I am a hopeless idealist, convinced of my own ideals, how irrealistic they may be, a revolutionist in heart and soul. As I already mentioned, I am thoroughly annoyed by stupid and ignorant people, but I also detest lazy people and people who have the talent and brains to do something useful, but often refrain from doing so, for whatever reason. All in all, I may not be the nicest or funniest or even most interesting person to spend time with, but I’m certainly not the worst person to talk to either. Or so I vainly hope.