New website - who this?

Moving Along

As I finalize the finishing touches on my new web design, it’s interesting for me to look back at the posts I’ve done in the past, see where this website has come since its initial debut in 2017, and take a deep dive into what is now its third design iteration.

When I first started this project, it was a straightforward blog. The purpose was simple. To own my own words. The world was a different place back then. We were in the heyday of social media. Still, I always thought that having a space on the internet reserved especially for me, where I could look back at times in my life without fear of losing my platform and ability to post to the whims and wills of whoever it was that owned the platform. Or the trends. Outside of trends, y’know?

I’d have to say I was looking ahead perfectly. Look at Twitter today. That was my most prominent social media outlet and still is, yet its ability to foster communities has faltered recently. Had I not sought my own space to create, I fear I may not be where I am today. Set up for success. Thanks, past me.

So that was all it was at first—a glorified Twitter or Instagram-like feed where I would dump my personal thoughts and interesting photos of San Francisco, add my social links, and tell people I met that they could always find me at SFwordsmith.com.

At that point, I had written a few short stories, namely Mya Rivera and The Last Heist Ever, and through submitting those stories to contests, I found the world of short fiction writing contests, and my production absolutely skyrocketed. I wrote so many stories. That, in turn, led me to write The Sunday Stories during the first part of the COVID shutdown. If you were with me back then, you would remember that it was an 18-week flash fiction series that I released each weekend. I was in rare form. I had a lot of content to market. Which inevitably meant that I needed a place to sell The Sunday Stories once I made it into a paperback. That’s when this website began to take on a new form. I revamped the theme, switched to Divi Builder for the backend, and learned a whole new system for designing a website as I gradually transitioned from an individual to a business and handled everything that came with it.

A few years later, I had outgrown the website once more, which led to the current design. I now needed not only a place to post my ramblings and hawk my wares but a place to showcase what has become a small library of creative fiction from all the entries of all the writing contests I haven’t won. (I did win a poetry contest, however,  you can read about that here and/or read the winning poem here.) Additionally, I felt it was finally time to release more products, so the long-awaited SF Fella merch has now dropped. You can find some of it in my personal shop, and you may also come across store exclusives in my Instagram or TikTok shops.

Print on Demand is weird in that some products are not always available depending on the platform you integrate with, so for some reason, I now have about four different shops. I still consider SFwordsmith.com the main one, and I hope you do, too. Because, as I stated earlier, independence is always key. Still, one can’t help but appreciate what social media platforms can do for a small creator nowadays. Getting into the world of physical goods has always been something I’ve been interested in, and I’m glad to have finally accomplished that. Still, personally, I would love to create some greeting cards, so if you’re a graphic artist reading this, please reach out to me and let’s collab.

With that said, the primary focus of this website has been and always will be me shouting out into the void in an attempt to reach someone – anyone – and I’ve gotten away from that recently. It’s time to get back to business. While I’ve been focusing on my main novels recently, so I don’t have many shorts to post at the moment, I’ve got an update on my book series and a new project to announce, and I should have a few more writing tech reviews to post in the coming months.

Until then!

-Spencer