Hi, I’m Indie — writer, artist, designer, accidental marketer, and one of those annoying people who genuinely cares about fonts, book covers, sentence rhythm, color palettes, conversion rates, and whether the internet is slowly flattening the human soul.

I started out as the artsy kid, then the art-school girl, then the MFA-in-creative-writing girl, then the freelance designer trying to pay rent with taste and stubbornness, and now I live somewhere in the messy middle of art, writing, branding, AI, and online business. Which is probably why this site exists.

I write about creativity in the real world — not the pretty Instagram version, but the actual thing: making work while tired, trying to stay original online, building a body of work, finding readers, selling ideas, making peace with technology, and figuring out how to stay human while everything gets optimized into paste.

This is where I think out loud.

About Me

I’m a writer, visual artist, brand strategist, digital creative, and recovering art-school romantic with an MFA in creative writing, too many tabs open, and a deeply unreasonable emotional attachment to notebooks, bookshops, image archives, and beautifully designed websites.

I built CreativInfluence because I wanted one place where all the things I’m obsessed with could live together without needing to pretend they were separate. Art. Writing. AI. Poetry. Branding. Online business. Creative work. The internet. Famous writers. Weird ideas. Target markets. Visual culture. SEO. Selling things without sounding dead inside. All of it belongs together, because in real life it already does.

That’s the strange part of being a modern creative. You don’t just make the work anymore. You also package it, title it, market it, optimize it, defend it, explain it, and somehow keep a little part of it alive through the process. One minute you’re trying to write a beautiful sentence. The next you’re thinking about thumbnails, metadata, audience intent, email funnels, and whether your homepage makes you look smart or embarrassing. It’s absurd. It’s exhausting. It’s also kind of fascinating.

I came up through art school and creative writing workshops with all the usual ideals — make something true, make something beautiful, follow the work wherever it leads. I still believe that. I’m not over it. But I also live in the real world, where beautiful things need visibility, good artists get ignored all the time, and talent without strategy is mostly just private suffering with nice typography.

So this site is my attempt to bridge those worlds.

I write for people like me: writers, artists, designers, freelancers, brand builders, overthinkers, internet weirdos, smart messy creatives trying to make a living without becoming content sludge. People who care about craft, but also money. People who still want the work to mean something. People who are curious about AI, but suspicious of what it does to taste, labor, identity, and the value of actual human perception. People who know creativity isn’t just inspiration — it’s systems, habits, timing, emotion, audience, positioning, discipline, obsession, and occasionally lying on the floor because everything feels fake for an hour.

I’m interested in the creative brain from every angle. Why some people make things compulsively. Why artists romanticize chaos. Why certain books or images crack open our lives at exactly the right time. Why branding works. Why some writing sells and some disappears. Why so much AI content feels technically competent and spiritually vacant. Why human work, even when messy, still hits harder.

A lot of what I do professionally lives at the intersection of art and influence. I care about visual identity, storytelling, positioning, market fit, discoverability, search traffic, audience psychology, and how to turn a strong idea into something people actually notice. Not because I think everything should be reduced to metrics, but because I think good work deserves a better fate than obscurity. I’ve seen too many brilliant creatives sabotage themselves with vague branding, lazy presentation, or the fantasy that the world automatically rewards quality. It doesn’t. You have to help it along.

So here you’ll find essays, guides, rants, lists, breakdowns, and half-philosophical, half-practical thoughts on things like writing craft, creative identity, online sales, SEO, visual storytelling, AI tools, human value, book marketing, design choices, artistic survival, and what it means to keep making things in a world that keeps trying to automate the interesting parts out of existence.

I’m also a poet, which probably explains why I still care about beauty more than is financially sensible.

I like flawed masterpieces, strange women in literature, dead geniuses with bad habits, niche subcultures, messy workspaces, black coffee, creative ambition, melancholic branding, and the exact moment when a vague idea suddenly becomes a real thing in the world. I like artists who are smarter than their image. I like writers who can actually write. I like people who make work with nerve.

Mostly, though, I care about this:

How do we build a creative life that is still recognizably ours?

Not just productive. Not just monetized. Not just optimized into polite little content bricks. Ours.

That’s what I’m doing here. Thinking through it in public. Making connections between art and commerce, instinct and strategy, beauty and utility, human mess and machine logic. Trying to tell the truth about creative work as it exists now — and maybe protect some of what matters before the whole thing gets sanded down into something faster and emptier.

So that’s me.

A writer with a visual brain.
An artist who learned marketing.
A digital-first creative who still believes taste matters.
A modern poet in a corporate world.
Still making things. Still paying attention. Still a little suspicious of anyone who says creativity can be systemized without losing blood in the process.

Welcome to CreativInfluence.

Short author bio

Indie Kaelstom is a writer, artist, and brand strategist with a background in art school, digital design, and an MFA in creative writing. She writes about AI, art, branding, books, SEO, online business, and the weird modern struggle of trying to stay original while making a living on the internet.

Slightly punchier bio

Writer, artist, designer, and digital-first creative with an MFA in creative writing and a brain permanently split between poetry, branding, AI, book covers, and search traffic. I write about art, writing, business, influence, and the fight to keep creative work human.

Tiny homepage bio

Writer. Artist. Brand-minded digital creative. MFA. Tech-curious, aesthetically opinionated, and still trying to make something real online.

CreativInfluence Theory

Creativity is like fire.

It needs a spark to start, and fuel to grow.

It consumes and searches and flickers.

Feed it, and it will provide meaning, comfort and inspiration.

Starve it and it will die.

We hope, by sharing things we find inspiring, uplifting, motivating, and passion-vivifying, we’ll keep your creative flame burning – and we hope you’ll share our site with others to do the same.