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The country who owned the this ship ⚓ no longer exists. The East German Volksmarine was dissolved in 1990. The landing s...
09/04/2026

The country who owned the this ship ⚓ no longer exists.
The East German Volksmarine was dissolved in 1990. The landing ship I served on - the Cottbus - was sold to the Indonesian Navy. Everything official from those years: gone or repurposed.

The poem I wrote on that ship in November of 1979 still exists. It sits in my notebook 📓. It is now waiting for it's publication date 📅.

Nobody tells you this part: publishing something you wrote 47 years ago feels less like a launch and more like a quiet decision, you made one afternoon.
It is real though. The plan is set in motion, this poem will be on page one.

If you have something finished that you have been carrying for years - what is stopping you from putting it out?

Follow wordsmeetai for more insights.
- Andek
Writing since 1979. Still learning. Learning never stops.

It is not AI that writes for me. He sits on the other side of the table. There is a difference. I learned it from a Rock...
09/03/2026

It is not AI that writes for me. He sits on the other side of the table. There is a difference.

I learned it from a Rock Band in East Germany called "Stern Meissen". Their leader said something like: As long as we're using the technology and the technology is not using us, we're okay.
He was talking about keyboards and drum machines in the early 80s. The same line applies now word for word.

When I go to AI and say "write me a poem," I get something hollow. Of course I do. The shape of a human thought with none of the warmth. The machine has no history, no forty -seven years of writing, no Baltic Sea in the winter.
But when I say "what should we do here?" and then push back the answer - that is a different conversation. It is a ping-pong game that got my novel written.

The soul in the work is still yours. The tech is just the other side of the table, waiting to play.

Do you use AI in your creative work - and if so, who's leading the game?

Follow wordsmeetai for more.
- Andek
Writing since 1979. Still learning. Learning never stops.

08/31/2026

"The Heart of Clearwater" is one of my latest poems. And it is the first poem I wrote for the city I now live in.
There was an unveiling ceremony for a city landmark - a clock - at the corner of Cleveland Street and Fort Harrison Avenue in Clearwater Florida. At that moment it came natural to simply write ✍️ down what I felt. I wrote it right there and then and turned it over till it was the way it looks now.

On that day I discovered for me a way to simply talk to AI, back and forth, like having a conversation, till I liked what I created. Two poems were created that way, sitting at a Starbucks right across from where the ceremony would take place a short while later.

Follow wordsmeetai for more.
- Andek
Writing since 1979. Still learning. Learning never stops.

For years it stayed in my drawer. The novel. The poems. The quiet fear that putting them out meant someone might actuall...
08/05/2026

For years it stayed in my drawer. The novel. The poems. The quiet fear that putting them out meant someone might actually read them.
Today I stopped waiting.
WHO ARE YOU Is a short fable for writers who spent decades building a voice, and now watch AI offer an easy one.
A lion who owns his hill. A honey badger 🦡 who fears nothing. Neither wins. Both keep learning.
It is live. The link is in my bio.
Follow wordsmeetai for more.
- Andek. Writing since 1979. Still learning. Learning never stops.

People keep asking me - doesn't AI take something away from the creation?Here's my honest answer: No. But I understand w...
07/17/2026

People keep asking me - doesn't AI take something away from the creation?
Here's my honest answer: No. But I understand why the question gets asked.

The fear is that a tool replaces the artist. That the voice gets averaged out into something smooth and acceptable and without edges.

That is a real risk - if you use the tool wrong. Like if you ask it to write for you instead of with you. If you accept it's first suggestion instead of pushing back. If you stop listening to your own instincts because the machine gave you something fast.

But that's not how I use it. AI doesn't write for me. The most it steals is my sleep - because now I have fewer excuses not to finish things.

The work is still mine. The new tools just made the workshop bigger (and more fun).

I wrote the full version of this argument and more, in the newsletter including the part where I almost gave up on the tools entirely. Link is in bio.

My novel "The Past Lies in the Future" is 200+ pages. 30 chapters, 10 interludes, a prologue, an epilogue, written in Ge...
07/15/2026

My novel "The Past Lies in the Future" is 200+ pages. 30 chapters, 10 interludes, a prologue, an epilogue, written in German and English.

At a certain point, I couldn't hold it all in my head at once. Like what did Werner say to his mom in chapter 7?
I needed something like NotebookLM - a place I could ask and get real answers.
The uncanny part is - it knows my novel better than I do at any given moment. I wrote it for years, NotebookLM read it in seconds.
My work got better organized because of it. Not better written. This part will stay with me.

What tools do you use to manage a big project?

-Andek
Writing since 1979. Still learning. Learning never stops.

I'm a writer, but not really a designer. The idea 💡 of building something that looked good 👍 on a screen was outside of ...
07/13/2026

I'm a writer, but not really a designer. The idea 💡 of building something that looked good 👍 on a screen was outside of my skill set.

Then Canva came for the rescue 🛟.

I want to say something careful here, because I think people misunderstand what these tools do for artists.
Canva didn't make me a designer. It gave me access to design 💬 thinking - the ability to ask "what if this text here, on that background, in that weight..."etc. and see the answer in seconds instead of having to hire someone or spend months learning software.

Being 60-something, that matters. I have ideas and I have the words, plus 45 years of material.
I just didn't have a way to put it on screen.

Now I do.

Has a tool ever given you back something you thought you couldn't do?

Let's be clear about something before this conversation goes any further.My writing started in 1979. The voice in my poe...
07/11/2026

Let's be clear about something before this conversation goes any further.
My writing started in 1979. The voice in my poems, the ideas 💡, all still mine. The memories, like the ship, East Berlin - all this is mine, meaning, created by me.

What changed after I started using AI - the reach. The 2am idea that used to evaporate by morning, now has somewhere to go.
The design I couldn't make because I'm not a designer, now gets made. Also, the 200+ page novel, now is navigable.

The tools didn't change what I make. They changed how much of it survived the gap between the idea and the ex*****on.

And that is quite something in my opinion.

What one tool has surprised you and actually worked better than expected?

I still write mostly in German first. Not because English is second, but because German is where the poems mostly live.T...
07/09/2026

I still write mostly in German first. Not because English is second, but because German is where the poems mostly live.
The English version is a re-creation, meaning a translation in the truest sense: not word-for-word, but feeling-for-feeling.

Sometimes the English version surprises me. A line that works in German, doesn't work in English.
Finding the equivalent for it, forces me to understand what I actually meant in the first place.

The first draft is mainly just a conversation with yourself. The language doesn't matter - what matters is that nobody is watching yet. That's when the truth comes out.

The second draft is different. Here you start deciding what the truth is for you.

Where do you start - with structure or with feeling?

Still not sure if I'm doing it right. Forty -seven years in.Every blank page asks the same question it asks a twenty yea...
07/07/2026

Still not sure if I'm doing it right. Forty -seven years in.
Every blank page asks the same question it asks a twenty year old sailor in the Baltic Sea: are you sure about this?

I have stopped waiting for the answer. In 2015 I wrote a poem about an old writer who sits, writes, thinks, looks, drinks and then stands up, because one cannot just write.

The paradox of craft is that the longer you do it, the more clearly you see both how far you have come and how far there still is to go.
So mastery perhaps is less a destination than it is a direction.

What keeps you coming back to something you haven't mastered yet?

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