I started writing a long time ago. It’s a statement and it is true. And it is not. I began writing fiction in 2012. Before that, I kept a journal where I wrote down all my thoughts and doubts. Vignettes of moments I believed would matter eternally while they were almost forgotten the moment a page was turned. So, what happened in 2012? Fanfiction happened. And when I had an idea for a story, I offered a prompt. Instead of strangers picking it up, I was encouraged to write the story myself. I haven’t stopped writing and putting my words out ever since. I quickly moved from fanfiction to original fiction because I wanted to flesh out my own characters, give them different quirks and different lives and I did. I wrote up a storm and I wrote novel length stories back to back. It so happens that between 2012 and 2015 I wrote 11 novels. They were all published on a site called Wattpad. From 2015 on things changed. The urge to write poetry got bigger and bigger. And I did. The novels made room for poetry, flash fiction and vignettes. In 2018, I self-published my first poetry collection. Many more followed and now in 2026, I am an author with eleven self-published books. I am not a best-selling author, not even close. I couldn’t live from my words. I would starve. But I always wrote from the heart and with a lot of passion. Still do, although things changed again. I made the mistake of joining Threads when I published my last book. I had high hopes. I did everything people advised me to do to make my poetry visible, but I stayed largely invisible. And frustrated. And that leads us to this post. On this new blog.
Word Thief. Word Thief is the name of a poetry collection I published in 2023 for my 40th birthday. It contained most poems I’d written between 2015 and 2022. The title came from a musician joking that we borrow words and inspiration from everything we hear and see, which makes every creative person a thief. I quite like that. It goes hand in hand with the philosophy that there is nothing new under this sun. And shortly after publishing Word Thief, I registered this blog with the intention of using it for something. I can’t quite remember what I wanted to make of it, but I wanted it to be different from the main blog I wrote.
This morning I woke up with the urge to start from scratch. Tabula Rasa. Clean slate. I had the urge before but never really followed it. What if it is not a place for new beginnings? What if everything falls apart and disintegrates?
I did it anyway. I deactivated all my social media profiles and put the main blog on private mode. I cannot say for how long I can and will be able to keep it up. Can we really leave decades worth of blog writing behind? Probably not. But starting over doesn’t mean erasing what came before.
But here is a new first post. In a new space. And maybe this will become a home for words that won’t feel neglected or forbidden to be spoken/written.
c.t.
