StormShock Media

Beginnings and Heyday

I have owned the StormShock.com domain since the year 2000. Before that, since 1996, I had been building informational and tutorial websites on free hosting services like Angelfire, Geocities, FortuneCity, and Xoom.

Over time, my StormShock website developed into a repository of content that I gradually developed while studying computer science, information technology, studio art, history, and mathematics in college. At the peak of this previous incarnation of the site, around 2003, StormShock.com was a conglomeration of about a dozen websites, had over 900 pages of content, ran on blog software that I wrote myself from scratch, and featured one of the biggest historical timelines ever assembled on the internet.

Rise of the Internet

But then the Internet got big. My content got lost in the massive surge in content that came onto the web as it became easier and easier for anyone to post content. Big companies like Google and WordPress made free software much better than anything I could ever write myself. Wikipedia came along and made my timeline and much of my content obsolete.

StormShock.com became largely obsolete and eventually I turned it into my personal blog running WordPress software.

StormShock Media, LLC

In 2016, I decided to become a professional writer. I registered an official business called StormShock Media LLC, then repurposed StormShock.com as its official website. I wrote several books. I sold a couple thousand books. But alas, selling a couple thousand books doesn’t generate enough money to make a living in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

The 10-Year Plan

In 2020, I went back to my old day job doing intellectual property legal work for the US government. It was great timing, because my old job was a stable work-at-home government job that paid well. The COVID pandemic hit the world a couple of months after I went back to the job.

Soon after I began working my old job again, I realized how many personal projects I had left unfinished and how many ideas I had left unexplored. I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working for someone else, while leaving all of my ideas and dreams in the dust. Thus began “The 10-Year Plan.”

When I was about thirteen years old, I’ve maintained a running list of ideas that I thought were worth pursuing. The list grew until at one point, it had over 1,000 ideas. So sometime in 2020, I began pruning that big list of ideas and deciding what to do with it. I eliminated the dumbest of the ideas until I arrived at 647 reasonably “good” ideas. Then I had to decide how to act on them.

I worked out the numbers. I knew I wanted to retire once and for all by the time my kids all went to college (in the year 2033). I knew I wanted to become a full-time novelist after I retired. I had 647 ideas to explore. There are 52 weeks in a year. There are 12 months in a year. If I spent each month focusing on each of my best ideas, and each week simultaneously dabbling a little in one of the not-so-good ideas, I would get through all 647 ideas in about ten years… and that became the plan.

StormShock Media is now the control hub of my 10-Year Plan. Each month, I do as much work as I can to bring one of my best ideas to fruition. Each week, I explore and write an article about one of the not-so-good ideas (a not-so-good idea for me might be a great idea for someone else with a different skillset).

Any work that I complete, you can find on (or linked from) StormShock.com.