While I have always loved coming up with story ideas and concepts for new and interesting worlds, it's never really been a focus in my life. I definitely tried my hand at writing every once in a while, when I was a kid, but I never would have even considered it a hobby.
I now work for an IT services company working primarily internally doing automation, process management, operations, managing our internal systems, and just a little bit of everything.
A little over a year ago, I was feeling a little bit of inspiration to work on my perennially recurring project, The New Dawn Franchise. After watching an Artifexian video, and seeing an ad spot for Campfire Pro, I started looking into it. I spent a little bit of time comparing Campfire Pro and World Anvil, which is something I had previously considered using, and eventually settled on Campfire after seeing their plans for the yet to be released Campfire Blaze (now Campfire Write). I impulse purchased the Wildfire pre-order for Blaze. Realistically, financially speaking, an approximately CAD$360 impulse purchase probably wasn't the best idea, but I am extremely glad that I did it.
Having somewhere now to put down all of the information that had lived inside my head for well over a decade was a huge help in actually moving forward with the project. However, after not too long I stalled on it again. This time though, there wasn't any risk of me forgetting everything, because it was actually written down somewhere, which was definitely a relief.
Not long after this, I became an active member of the Campfire Technology Discord and I got a message out of the blue one day from Levi, asking if I wanted to be a moderator. Since then, I have remained as active as I can be in the Campfire community, and I've loved every moment of it. It's probably the only reason I've actually started writing more seriously.
Then, over six months later, I binge watched the Around the Campfire podcast, and decided I wanted to submit something to Community Corner. I had an idea for a story that I had been kicking around for a while, but I couldn't find a way to fit it into my main project, so I figured I'd write a couple of chapters and that would give me something I could submit. After submitting though, I just didn't stop writing, and eventually embraced it. (see below: The Legion of The Immortal Soldier) This was the first time actually starting any sort of real writing project. The New Dawn Franchise, while I loved it, was really still just a random collection of worldbuilding details and vague story concepts at the time.
Later, when the Campfire Explore beta launched, I decided to start a new project. While there have been various other side projects that I've spent time on, due to the fact that most of my time spent on writing/worldbuilding had been set in two projects, I had so many ideas that had come to me at varying points which I just had to dismiss because I didn't have anywhere to use them. So, I decided to create an Explore project, where I could both try to use every facet of Explore, and was good for testing it during the beta, but it would also give me a place with maximum freedom to explore any ideas I felt like without restriction. This project was eventually renamed to The Many Worlds Project (see above) when Explore launched publicly.