Introduction

"As young readers like to know 'how people look', we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters," wrote Louisa May Alcott in the opening chapter of her classic work Little Women. There is only one of me and I have no sisters, but I will still try to sketch a more detailed picture of this blog's author.

You can call me Astrid Amarantha Valen, unless you know my real  name and are allowed to call me by that instead. Nightwish fans probably know I'm one of them by this point: A teenager named Astrid ("Astral Romance") Amarantha ("Amaranth") Valen writing a blog called The Poet and Her Pen ("The Poet and the Pendulum") must have something to do with Tuomas's epic band. I only discovered it a year and a half ago, but I already own the entire discography and have proudly declared Nightwish the best band in the world on many (often public) occasions. Feel free to check out my profile for some of my other favorite music, which goes form Handel to KISS.

The Nightwish obsession extends further than just the band itself, though. Why do you think I started teaching myself Finnish and plan on attending Finlandia University?  Definitely not because of Handel and Paul Stanley. I've even written school papers on my love of Finland.

Other strong interests I have that will pop up often include: Wuthering Heights, vampires, gothic literature, and gothic metal. All of those stem from my status as a babybat (who really wants to grow up and lose that title). Not to sound rude, though, but I probably know more about classic Romantic and Gothic literature than some Eldergoths. My English teacher even had me teach my AP English class on the latter topic because I wrote a 17-page research paper on it. It was fun. I'm probably one of the few babybats in the world that embraced the goth subculture through Wuthering Heights instead of the music or fashion route. On the other hand, guess what my favorite book is? Yeah, it was pretty easy to guess.

That leads me to the topic for tomorrow's post: "The Three Common Interpretations of Wuthering Heights", based on a journal entry I wrote last month. That's what I write for fun. It's too bad no one can have a career as a Brontë scholar, because I would be a shoo-in.

Listening to: "Lagoon" by Nightwish
Reading: Paradise Lost by Milton. I'm in the middle of Book I right now because it took me two weeks to read the critical essay at the beginning. It's sad when the 400-year-old poetry is easier to read than the twenty-first century publication at the beginning of the book.