As I type this, I am keenly aware that I am writing this book in reverse, hopefully with hindsight to guide me.  I asked many questions of myself during the writing of the book, and the central question that I always came back to was this:

Why should this book exist?

The answer took me back further than what I could have imagined, and unfortunately, to you, the reader, it means explaining something briefly about myself.

My childhood was one of force-fed learning.  There were no mysteries.  Santa was denied from me, I never had a birthday cake and an A- could have meant a whipping.  At some point, I did learn however, that I could write creatively, and I was spared the rod as long as I held a pencil and it looked as though I was studying.  And write, I did, surreptitiously scribbling various short stories through my daily 4-hour study sessions.  I learned that writing has value, one that starts as being mine and mine alone.  I would carry that belief with me long after I began writing poetry in 2003.

Throughout the years, I have been part of multiple writing groups, ranging from social forums to semi-professional critiquing sites.  At times, I had been a moderator or guest writer.  I loved sharing my work, and so did many others.  But when we spoke about the value of the work, some would often shrug and say "I am an amateur, it's just for fun" or "I just like to get my poems out there...  Money doesn't matter". 

When I spoke about value, however, I had not been speaking about monetary gain on its own.  The value of my writing is that:
* It is derived from my own experiences, which were unique to me.  I consider that I only have finite experiences that I can write about, in so many ways.  Each poem, then, has part of my life in it.  That is part of its value.
* It represents my skills as I employ them.  For some, it is rhyme and metre.  When I consider my own work, my strengths were in figurative language, symbolism and oddly, spatial composition - how I utilise double meaning with enjambment, discontinuity with white space etc.  How I edit my work, therefore, has value to represent who I am as a writer.

So what happens when we share or publish our poems?  Self-publishing is clear enough - we retain both values while we control our exposure.  But what happens when we publish through others?  By this, I mean other publishers, collective publishing and competitions.  Each of these entities will have different priorities, which, in turn, may impact on the value of your work.  Here are some examples:
*A newspaper competition may change your formatting to save print space for their own advertisements.  This reduces the skill aspect of your work.
* A collective poetry group may print your work, with the provision that they can use it for their own purposes and without stipulations on the limits of its use.  Your poem ends up being in a newsletter, the annual anthology, in the group's advertising.  The value of your poem being unique is therefore reduced due to overexposure.  Established publishers often do not want to publish something if they do not have exclusive rights to it, so you may have inadvertently sabotaged your own writing career by limiting your available work.

At this point, these questions often pop up:
What if your work becomes popular?  Is that not its own reward?  After all, didn't these publishing entities help you to become famous?

At this point, I always say, read the fine print.  The value of your writing can change over time, as you yourself change.

I am always reminded of the 80s band Salt-n-Pepa, which was the first female group to hit gold and platinum, following the success of their single 'Push It'.  They were nominated for a Grammy Award.  However, their career was plagued by struggles over creative control and at one point, 100% of their royalties were paid to someone else, not the band.  They had to fight to reclaim their royalties, a battle that lasted until 2004.  Exposure is tempting, but when you are working with others, there is often compromise.

Read the fine print.  Think about what you went through to write your work and what parts of you that you are giving others creative control over.

So why should this book exist?  It is, frankly, a book about an unfortunate encounter that I had experienced on Wattpad.  There are some who might consider it to be negative on my part, to air such an interaction in public.  Some of it is ugly, and I might come across as being peevish. Non-fiction is not my genre, and this is hardly going to raise my profile as a poet.  Part of me feels despondent about the situation and hopes that it would go away.

In the end, I decided to write this book because there must be another little child out there, who needs to know the value of her thoughts, the ones she hides with a pencil.