Hey guys,

I figured I'd show my face and give a little introductory and maybe a bit of a back brief on who I am for this new DA profile.

A lot has changed in the past two years for me, for any of you who have fallowed me or are familiar with me on *dravendesignnet, ever since joining the Marine Corps I've been a bit of a stranger. I wanted to update my status here on DA, my life has settled down a little, things are back in scope, and I have the reigns again, so I suspect I will be around DA like I used to be, but perhaps not in the same manner as I used to be.

In May of 2004, when I was a junior in High School and I joined DA, I found it to be a great place to not only expose my own creative abilities, but to dive into the world of, well, the world, as far as their creative ambitions go. So I was very active on DA with some minor graphic design (I learned a lot and owe a lot to DA), some web design, and it was natural for me to take the poems I was writing, sometimes five or six a day, and put them on DA. Now there is likely over 300 of those poems on *dravendesignnet, for the most part all added about the time they were written, if not some, at that specific time. They were also very raw.

Now fast forward to December of 2005 and I was in boot camp in San Diego, I became less active on DA as a result of the Marine Corps. Although still writing. Sometime in June of 2006 I started the project to compile some of the poems I had written, and that manifested its self into a book mid deployment in 2007. But not after getting married to my best friend on January 4, 2007, just shortly before going on pre-deployment training to California, and then to Iraq. I returned home just a sliver away from publication of "Of Blood & Ink" and fell into a pretty big hole as far as my marriage goes, and I put OBAI on hold, at that time, maybe indefinitely.

Fast forward again to September of 2008, and I am on my last deployment to Iraq, with some down time, I re focused on OBAI and finished editing, and some of the cover art work, and officially published AND distributed OBAI on my 22nd birthday, Dec 27, 2008. With the web site launched OfBloodandInk.com, I am just shy of returning back to Hawaii, and I am running OBAI at full bore, with advertising going on Yahoo, Google, MySpace, and hopefully even here on DA. With December of 2009 in sight, and my honorable discharge out of the Marine Corps, I look forward to returning home to Oregon and focusing more of my life to the various creative endeavors I have just scratched the surface of.

So if you are a friend from a lifetime ago, I look forward to re establishing communication again, and getting back into this creative world I miss so much, and if I have never come into contact with you, I look forward to the new acquaintances, and friends! Thanks so much!

Trenton Phoenix
"Of Blood & Ink"
OfBloodandInk.com
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