Alternate:Words

 

 

Wel­come to Alternate:Words! I am Thorsten (with a silent “h”). I am a writer and com­poser and on these pages I share per­sonal thoughts and poetry with who­ever may come my way.

Alternate:Words started back in 2003 as a web­site pro­mot­ing my writ­ing and edit­ing ser­vices and has since gone through mul­ti­ple revi­sions and redesigns (and so has the “About” page). The term “alter­nate words” orig­i­nally rep­re­sented my trans­la­tion and edit­ing ser­vices (Ger­man< ;>;Eng­lish) but has evolved to now stand syn­ony­mously for the way I approach writing.

Since chang­ing Alternate:Words from a web­site to a blog in 2006 to pro­mote my debut sound­track album “Infil­tra­tor – A Music­novel” it has become a much appre­ci­ated com­pan­ion on my path to find­ing my own cre­ative voice. What I write within basi­cally falls into two cat­e­gories: poetry and mus­ings. Both of them are rather var­ied though dri­ven by a fun­da­men­tal love for nature, my spir­i­tu­al­ity and my inter­est in psy­chol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy. My aim with­ing these pages is to be up-building, thought pro­vok­ing and moti­vat­ing. From time to time I share my strug­gles with cre­ativ­ity in an effort to encour­age those strug­gling in like man­ner. I believe in syn­er­gies and that we all are (inter)dependent on each other regard­less if we’re, at our core, highly inde­pen­dent or not.

In its cur­rent state Alternate:Words rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone on my jour­ney of cre­ative expres­sion. Not least through writ­ing on here have I come to the real­iza­tion that my truest pas­sion is sto­ry­telling, its most fun­da­men­tal expres­sion being music.

In fact, I grew up with music. As a tod­dler I learned walk­ing by my father turn­ing the bal­ance dial on his stereo from one side to the other. I lit­er­ally fol­lowed the sound of music, the speak­ers stand­ing sev­eral feet apart. From him I got my obses­sion with clar­ity of sound. In addi­tion, my mother is a clas­si­cal music expert and exposed me to the greats of yore from infancy on. To this day Shostakovitch, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Haydn and Wag­ner are some of my favorite com­posers. As a result I began com­pos­ing while I was about eight years old, my first “key­board” being a Bon­tempi B9 Chord Organ (see Bon­tempi); I later “moved on” to this lit­tle key­board: Casio PT-1. Back in those early days I dreamed of com­pos­ing sym­phonies, which later turned into a desire to com­pose film music.

Music pro­vides the ini­tial spark which in turn ener­gizes my writ­ing. It’s an inher­ent syn­ergy of which I was always aware but not truly con­scious of until recently, helped in part by writ­ing on this blog. In June of 2006 I self-published my first sound­track album, the afore­men­tioned Infil­tra­tor — A Music­novel. It started off as indi­vid­ual pieces of music over a six months period which even­tu­ally formed an inter­con­nected story of a spe­cial oper­a­tive in the not too dis­tant future. The ini­tial response was extremely encour­ag­ing despite my rather timid approach to mar­ket­ing. I have since focused on devel­op­ing my com­pos­ing skills and am now pur­su­ing new sound­track projects in var­i­ous areas.

In clos­ing I’d like to point out that Alternate:Words is not to be per­ceived as a clas­si­cal blog with the lat­est post being the most cur­rent state. I see it much more as a book with var­i­ous chap­ters where there is nei­ther old nor new. My poetry and mus­ings from a few years ago are still as rel­e­vant to me as those I just recently posted. Until blog­ging may evolve fur­ther to pay trib­ute to such writ­ing I encour­age you to peruse the archives and to feel free to com­ment on any post that speaks to you. I will most cer­tainly read it and respond! And if you’d like to get in con­tact with me directly you are wel­come to do so by send­ing me an email: info [at] alter­nate­words [dot] com.