So why do you care?
Let’s cut to the chase, this is a vanity site. It’s a place where I, JF, can showcase the various projects I’m working on. I’m a graphic designer by trade but, while I love what I do, I’ve recently found other things that I love a lot more and I want to do these things for a living. These things are, in a nutshell, telling stories.
So why do you care? Because that means I’ll be putting up free content as often as I can for you to enjoy. If you’re interested in the creative process and the road to getting published, you can follow my progress and learn with me as I plunge into the terrifying world of self-publishing. You care because you share some of my passions like drawing, comics, modeling and most of all writing.
My goal is to keep things transparent so that you can learn from my mistakes and see what I do right and I do wrong. If I’m lucky, this site will be part of a great and positive change in my life and should I succeed, you’ll know how I did it.
Why do I think I can write?
Honestly I ask myself that question all the time.
It’s one of my biggest worries and the cornerstone of why I’m building myself a more active internet presence that, for all intent, I am not a writer. I don’t have a degree in creative writing and I’m not an English major. I’m not mentored by anyone and I’ve never published anything. I don’t even have a Starbucks fidelity card. So I’m starting from scratch.
That’s what makes the journey interesting. While I’ve been telling stories all my life through role playing games, unpublished works and comics here and there I don’t have an ‘in’. No sane publisher would look at my résumé and think that yes, this is the background of our next best selling author. I have to build myself a brand and a fan base so that I can support myself through my works. I’ve decided to do it transparently by offering content and a window into my process to those who want to see it.
Going back to the original question though, I think I can write because a few years ago I took the leap. I went from being that guy who thinks about writing a book and I wrote one. A beautiful three hundred and fifty page steaming pile of garbage. It’s not a good book. To put it into perspective it’s about vampires.
Despite the used up subject matter and the obviously amateurish approach to the art form, two things stood out for me; first, the book wasn’t that bad. In fact, with a little editorial work and a few re-writes it could probably stand on its own as a forgettable piece of mediocre vampire fiction gathering dust on a shelf. Most importantly though, I’ve found that I absolutely love writing. Not the idea of writing or the imagined portrait of what I think a writer is, but the actual act of putting a story into words, creating characters that live and breathe and playing around with the various strands of a tale until it makes sense and becomes compelling.
I think I can write because I believe that anything that I adore so completely as I do writing and don’t immediately and absolutely suck at I can make work for me if I put in the effort.
The Plan
Here, have some bullet points:
- Build content. Things like a book or two, some art, some short stories, anything to make it worth someone's time to visit this site.
- Put together and launch a site with said content. Keep adding content and build an audience for myself.
- Gather feedback to improve the quality of my work.
- Publish a book and sell it to you and your friends for a reasonable sum.
- Use the success of my self published endeavour to move on to the next project. So on and so forth until, hopefully, one day, I'm making stuff to entertain you for a living.
Easy right? Well, let's get to work.