Dear curious readers

Everything I wrote up until 2011 is crap. Two-dimensional characters, clichéd expressions, shallow subject matters, angsty poetry. I've got nearly 30 pieces of work on FictionPress, which includes nine poems, sixteen short stories (one of them is a collection of short stories based on the same theme), seven one-shots and three longer stories. I think that adds up.

The longer stories were good for practise, but have little-to-no planning, so the chapters don't flow well - if at all. Out of everything, I think only one poem, eight short stories and one one-shot have any potential. The rest are just eurgh - I'm anonymous on there for a reason, okay?

Remember when I said my New Year's resolution was to write more poetry? Well I've stuck to it and, six months in, I've written about 35 poems in my super-secret notebook. When I told my friend Rose this, she freaked out - I had written 35 poems and hadn't shown her? She also writes poetry but far more secretly than I do, since she doesn't boast about it shamelessly in a blog. Hah.

Anyway, so I realised 35 poems is sort of a lot. And I hadn't once gone back and revised any of them. So one morning, armed with a blue pen and too much time before sunrise, that was exactly what I did.

I was astonished by what I read. Not only did I have atrocious handwriting (although to be fair, I did write a lot of it while on a moving bus) but most of the poems were utterly depressing. Which just goes to show, you can look happy on the outside, but inside you're just a melancholy poet waiting to be unleashed on some paper...

I also discovered that aside from the odd spelling mistake and word change, I didn't need to do much to the poems. And I decided that, as embarrassingly depressing as some of the poems are, the majority of them I'd be happy to let Rose read. When I told her, she was worryingly over-excited. I may put that off for a while...

The same cannot be said for the stuff on my FictionPress account. When my "sensei"in writing, Sharena (a writer, insane, and hilarious), asked to see some of my old stuff, I panicked without really knowing why. I wasn't too embarrassed to show her, but it certainly felt like something similar. I think my immediate reaction was shame: I knew a lot of my old stuff was rubbish. I COULD have just sent her some of my newer stuff, or a piece that I thought was less lame, but I think like a cyber-stalker cyber-sleuth.

If I sent her anything from my FictionPress account, all she would have to do is type a single line from it into Google search and my whole account would appear for her perusal. I just couldn't let that happen, nope, sorry! I'm keeping my anonymous FictionPress account under lock and key, until perhaps I become really successful as a writer. Then I can reveal that yes, I was [obscure username] all those years ago - but look how far I've come since then, how much I've grown as a writer!

Until then, you're all just going to have to imagine what my writing was like between 2009 and 2000andwheneverIbecomefamous.

But actually, Sensei Sharena managed to talk me into sending her something with her Jedi mind control powers. I chose something I never finished, and so it didn't make an appearance on the web at all. I compared it with my other stuff and it wasn't as bad as the rest, so I was a lot less ashamed to send it to her. Although I did make several disclaimers that went along the lines of "if it actually does suck, I didn't write it!". Hopefully I'm not as rubbish as I seem to think I was, but the jury's still out on that one...