For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a builder of worlds—and of the stories, images, systems, and meaning that define them. I didn’t always have the tools. For much of my early life, I had little more than imagination and the stubborn belief that whole worlds could be made real if I just found a way to show them.

Now I have that way.

What I’m building with Durajan and The Awakened World is the most ambitious, personal, and creatively fulfilling journey I’ve ever taken on. It’s not just a novel. It’s not just a brand. It’s not even just a world. It’s the emotional truth of life’s experiences combined with everything I’ve spent decades learning. From storytelling, worldbuilding, and editing to art direction, strategy, design, and UX—it’s all finally converging into one unified act of authorship.

Trying to Do It All

To be perfectly transparent, I have a long creative career spanning decades, but I’ve spent most of it building for others. This is for me—and, hopefully, for you.

There’s something a little crazy (and a little reckless) about trying to do everything yourself. And yet here I am: writing, designing, building, branding, publishing, promoting, refining, visualizing, and dreaming it all into existence.

• Branding and identity: Designed it.
• Manuscripts: GDocs first; then MS Word when it got too big.
• Logo and visual system: Designed from scratch.
• Website: Webflow, fully responsive, integrated with CMS. What is here on this site is perhaps 1/3 of what its built for. But that will come with future books in the Durajan Series and other projects in the works.
• Lore and story: Beyond the 107K words in The Chronicles of Durajan, there are over 200,000 more in the series, with hundreds of thousands behind the scenes—additional lore, character motivations, histories, political dynamics, and more.
• Social content and assets: Created in Figma and Photoshop.
• Book layout: Done in Atticus, exported to multiple formats.
• Cover Design: Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma and more.
• Voice and narration: Scripted and in production. I can’t wait to reveal who’s voicing it. She is amazing.
• Maps: Illustrated in Wondercraft. To be shared soon.
• Merch: Designed and staged. Coming soon.
• Planning: I live in spreadsheets and journals. I'd be lost without them.
• Posts like this: Written late at night or early morning, usually after wrestling with plot timelines or refining UI flows.
• Visuals: Carefully crafted, color corrected, retouched, and often composited using AI tools, Photoshop and more.

This is the first time in my life I’ve allowed myself to go all-in on a creative vision at this scale—a passion project made for me, and shared with you. No client. No brief. No external prompt. Just the compulsion to build something enduring and deeply personal.

Why? Because I’ve Seen the Masters Do It

I’ve always been drawn to the great worldbuilders: Cornwell, Tolkien, Lucas, Martin, Brown, Lee, Feige, Linke & Yee—even the modern game architects and animators shaping cinematic experiences today. But it’s not just the scale that moves me. It’s the coherence. The care. The way a story can feel like a real place.

Maybe even more than that, it’s the quiet truth behind it all: someone once sat alone in a room, wrestling with the right name for a mountain, or the politics of a long-fallen kingdom. And they kept going. They didn’t stop at “good enough.” They chased immersion. They chased truth. That has always moved me. Singular vision. Bold imagination. The will to shape entire worlds.

The Challenge and the Joy

Yes, it’s monumental.

Trying to build the world, build the platform, write the story, and make it all cohere is the creative Everest I never knew I was climbing. And yet here I am—still smiling at basecamp, tightening the straps, and looking up.

Because despite the spreadsheets, the versioning, the software learning curves, and the occasional self-doubt, I am—without exaggeration—loving every second of this.

I finally feel like I’m doing what I was built to do: to craft something beautiful and meaningful. A world of memory and myth. A world I believe is worth getting lost in.

And I can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.