I have a lifelong fascination with the ocean and now live in a small seaside town. My husband and I used to take picnics and spend most of the day at the beach standing in thigh high water, casting surf fishing rods to catch flounder and whiting. It was such a beautiful way to spend the day on our cinnamon colored sands with the cerulean blue of the white capped waves and the salt air on our cheeks.

For bait, we would catch sandfleas, which are not fleas at all but a type of crab that lives in wet sand at the water’s edge of our beach. We would wait for the waves to come in and then use a long handled net to catch the crabs going out with the flow of the water. The sandfleas are about a half inch to an inch long with no claws and they don’t bite. They breathe by gills and can live out of the water for a few hours to a few days. We would put them in a bucket with wet sand and use them to bait our hooks. Many good fish dinners came out of our partnership with sandfleas. I picked the name sandflea because it evokes such warm memories of our days in the sun.

Acadec is an acronym for Academic Decathlon, which is a high school competition involving 7 different subject matters along with an interview, a speech, and an essay. Hence forth the "Decathlon" I was in the program for 3 years. I got the "56" from my freshmen football Jersey number. Basically my name is my passion! 

It is not an acronym but a shortened form of my full name: Neha Srivastava. So, you guys could call me Neha if you want :) But, after so many days as @nehasri , it just kind of sounds good. It's my identity as a writer. I love this shortened form for a specific reason, even though that was not it when I started using it - it can be divided into two parts - neha & sri. Neha, my actual name, is derived from the Sanskrit word "sneh" meaning love or affection, thus, in essence it means love or someone who loves. Sri, the suffix I use and which is taken from my surname "srivastava", means Goddess. So essentially, my pen-name means "love-goddess". Hence, in every thing I write, love, in any of its myriad forms, is an important part.

You know that song 'flag-pole sitta' by Harvey Danger? That one hit wonder claiming that getting your tounge pierced felt "fine".... it's a damn good song and a HUGE lie. That shit hurts bad.

That said....

In the days of my early twenties I liked the idea of traveling, and decided to visit a Rainbow Gathering in Ocala Florida, to test my travel legs. A Rainbow Gathering is a gathering of the Rainbow Family, and for any who do not know, the 'Rainbow' Family is a tribe of nomadic hippies who camp across the country in national forests year round. They Live communally and it was a wonderful experience to meet such free spirited naturalists at the time.

It was my first gathering and second morning there, when I would come across a piercer with individually wrapped brand new needles in abundance, handing out free piercings. I had been looking into new expieriences at the time, and i started talking to him about if I would consider getting one done.

My crazy self said, "Well I have thought about my tounge, but..."

Then, he convinced me.

He had a bunch of new tounge rings, and i picked one with the balls on it like googley-eyes. I thought that the obvious choice, so that my tounge could be imagined as a tiny monster in a cave sometimes when I got bored.

SO.... the first thing about tounge piercings is they are sore for the first two days. The second thing is, your teeth will find every way for you to accidentally bite the new stud while eating. The third thing that should probably have been mentioned first is that the number one way to keep a new tounge piercing clean is to carry salt water with you constantly to swish and spit a lot. Sounds fun right?

It wound up getting me a nickname on my first night with it. In the woods at night firewood is a must, especially in february, and my camp had broken it's hatchet that day. We all set out induvidually into the woods to find a fellow camper somewhere, who might have a hatchet we could use to chop some wood for the evening.

I wound up being the person to find it, when I found a man I've described before as a "Crocodile Dundee lookin' mother fucker".

It was a situation where the light wasn't fully gone but the sun was setting and i was on a path with thick bamboo on one side, at a fork in the small foottrails made through the different clustered clearings around me. There he was walking with his pack and a rather cool cowboy hat. I told him he looked like the type of man who could help my friends and I with a hatchet, and he really did just so happen to have one on him.

How the name came about was when introducing myself to this gentleman, I said my name was "sth-Towie" my best attempt to say 'Tori' that I could muster, but the nice man heard "Story" instead.

He called me Story all night, and it caught on, and even my friends liked the misunderstanding, because they found my lisping tounge ring condition funny, and I cant blame them.

The humor I found in my lisp, I used to fuel a soap-box spoken word session outside of Disney land the next day. Reciting "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout" real loud in the parking lot. We had gone to Orlando for the day for the Further Tour, a Phish type Jam Band thing... Fucking hippies...

ANYway..

Back to the story of Sto.. My pen name!

After it stuck a while I decided to embrace it, and added a "S" to the front of "Tori" to be pronounced just like Story in a Story book.

It never took too much effort to further make it clever for me to use specifically, by adding in different metaphors and reasons I would choose this as my pen.

It is the reason I change my picture a lot, because a good story can come illustrated. Lol

More random things pop in my head but you can find examples throughout my posts randomly and see some of what I mean..

Now it just sort of suits me ^-^

Miles Nowhere is a misnomer. The moniker itself implies a sense of spaciousness, desolation and alienation

Yet, to be miles from nowhere points to......actually.......being........somewhere.

Quite the conundrum innit?

My real name is Harry Potter but for obvious reasons I decided to adopt a pen name.

My fifth wife took it upon herself to fuck my literary career after what was a horrendous and turbulent breakup.

She stole and plagiarized my autobiography and the rest is history.

Oh well.......telle est la vie.

At least she didn't steal my dick poems.

Pronounced Vixen.

My images bring some to their knees

They clamor and beg me to please.

For a life time my life has been this way

So this is partly why my pen name will stay.

Yes I flirt, I play I trick I tease.

Not unlike men try to do with me.

There are other deeper reasons why

I chose this name to go by.

Foxes are magical weather you choose

to believe it or not

To have the gift of third sight,

To speak with those who

are passed into the light.

To help others cross over peacefully.

So these are some of my reasons

Behind the name.

FYI: my birth name means:

Divine Light in Hand

Honestly, I didn't realize why I chose it when I signed up.

Other than liking Game of Thrones, it just felt right.

To explain, I've always felt that the struggle for identity seems like one that continually plagues all young people. I've yet to meet one, including myself, that can boast the perk of immunity. And despite all appearances, I don't think anyone under the age of 30 can honestly say they know who they are.

Which brings me to my pen name.

Why?

In my opinion, writing is the most personal thing that any one person can bring themselves to do. At its core, writing is imparting your deepest convoluted thoughts, feelings, experiences, and whatever the fuck to paper by pen (or keyboard). Broadcasting what you know by how you learned it, by whatever process, however it went.

What is love? Pain, jealousy, avarice, belonging, loneliness, life.

What is life?

Life is what it is to the person living it. 

It's what shapes you.

Defines you.

Gives you your identity.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is this:

I chose AGirlHasNoName because this is one life that hasn't yet been truly lived.

I'm discovering it - myself - as I live.

And, as I write.

Mark. How on earth does a girl like me end up with a pen name like Mark? Well, it wasn't my idea actually, it was my nickname first. In the seventh grade I had an old friend of mine, we'll call her Ellie, make her friend Savannah call me. I sat in my bedroom watching Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark when I received a call. I didn't recognize the number, but I knew that it was from my city. I assumed that maybe a classmate of mine called to ask about homework or something.

"Hello?" I asked.

"Heeeyyyy Mark!" A feminine voice on the other line chuckled. I knew it was her, Savannah. I could also hear Ellie laughing in the background.

From there on out I was called Mark for the rest of the year. Everyday, the two would walk past me in the halls and shout my nickname. At first, I thought they were doing that to make fun of me. Later, I discovered they wanted to give me a nickname but with no malicious intent. Over time, I accepted it and all of my friends started calling me "Mark".

When I first started out on Wattpad, I wanted to be completely anonymous. I tried to think up of some sort of name to use. One day in my English class, Ellie and Savannah went by their usual routine of calling out my nickname. Then it finally came to me, I'll use Mark. Now online, I'm only known as Mark, and no one knows my real name unless they're my real life friends or very, very close friends from Wattpad. I have to admit, I've grown rather fond of the name, and I'm glad those two gave it to me.

In all honesty, ennord is really just my first name (Erin) the first initial of my middle name and the first four letters of my last name (Nordhof)

But I guess there are some interesting tidbits behind my name (depending on your definition of “interesting”).

ERIN-

My parents actually wanted to name me something else (that’s now my middle name), but ended up going with Erin, since they thought was a unique name. Tell that to all the other Erin’s/Aaron’s/Arron’s I’ve met in my life.

Although I guess it’s better than another name they had in mind (In case you were wondering, it was Gertrude).

NORDHOF-

My dad’s last name, and a lot of people tend to think it is German (Even a native German speaker I knew). Only when I visited South Africa did people know right away it was Dutch. However, they were confused because I have dark hair, brown eyes, and I’m barely 5’5 (Definitely not stereotypical of the Dutch).

And that’s it guys, the story behind ennord! Nothing too exciting, but hey, it’s a name!

My pen name is Lee Williams. As a child I grew up in an unsafe family situation. As an adult, I live still affected by that abuse - for personal safety I usually cannot use my real name when I write. I decided to take my middle name and my husband's middle name and put them together. The combination has created a pseudonym that allows me to retain the identity of who I am. Instead of fretting over continued restraints imposed through no fault of my own, I find it a beautiful reminder of my current life and how far I've come.