deviantART

Not posting this for the badge, but to tell how I got to where I am. If you're interested in that, take a look.

I officially joined deviantART in November of 2007. I had been aware of the site though for around a year and had finally made an account after my good friend Eddie, whose dA alias is Cwayon, made one to follow the brilliant photomanipulation work of two well-known tag/sig artists in the underground digital art scene. One was the now deceased tag artist who went by PMI, who had co-founded the legendary (in the underground digital art scene) Masterworks collective. The other person I still know to this day, though athma has removed all of their work from deviantART upon departing the world of graphic design to pursue another line of work.

Upon joining I posted a few of my digital artworks and saw dA as a place to upload and archive my art. It wasn't until around late 2009 I became aware of dA as a place for literature, which had always been my first and foremost passion. I've told this story many times, but how I came to become interested in what the community had to offer was because of seeing a news article in the footer by LadyLincoln. I started becoming more and more interested in this place as somewhere to put my work out.

There was one other thing that made me turn to deviantART, and that was the closure of a great digital art site where I presided over on a daily basis. The site of Delta-Visions, or DV as it was known to those of us who fondly remember it, was owned by Senthrax and admined by myself, Spirarend, @Tula-wena, and Will3Style and a few others. Some notable artists who came through DV are Andi of TreehouseCharms, clyzm, and @fmacmannus.

DV fell on hard times though, traffic was at an all-time low and getting worse and Senthrax made the important but devastating decision to close its doors. Upon this happening I tried a few other small art sites, but none felt like home. deviantART became more and more cozy to me and remembering that it was a place for literature I began to slowly involve myself more and more. I feel the first time I was really recognized was when SRSmith gifted me a premium membership out of nowhere. When I asked him why he did so, he told me something along the lines that I was doing a good thing, referring to a group I was running at the time called InPrint.

InPrint eventually had to close down because of the lack of staff help I had to run such a group with such a monumental task. It was at this time, after talking with my first good dA friend, OritPetra, I decided to try to create another group similar to TalentedWritersGuild. What came about was my second dA friendship, silverfleckedlullaby, and she is the entire reason that EliteLiterature is still here today, now run by anapests-and-ink and LionesseRampant.

Sadly, OritPetra and silverfleckedlullaby both disappeared under mysterious circumstances. OritPetra had seemed off before becoming inactive, and most troubling of all was a poem she posted before her inactivity:



As for silverfleckedlullaby, she posted in the 'Help With Life' forum about some personal demons she had always faced and then deactivated a day later, devastating myself and others. She was a great writer, and as previously mentioned, she helped me build up the phenomenal lit group, EliteLiterature from out of nowhere and I was sad and angry to see her go.

Soon after, I ran into LiliWrites on her first account and was recruited to the DailyLitDeviations poetry team alongside betwixtthepages, who is an amazing person and writer. I was inspired to do so because of the writers who were on the DLD team I not only admired but strived to be like.

A year later, I was happily surprised to be offered a position as a CV and then my reign began!