Always. In everything. Since 1999.
My grandmother, Vera Alice Connett, was the kind of woman you don't fully understand until you're grown. When you're a kid, she's just there — steady, warm, always present. It takes years to realize what that actually means. That not everyone has that. That it's rare.
She was the glue of the whole family. The kind of person who held things together without making it obvious she was doing it. Strong and firm when it was needed. A soft place for your head when it wasn't. She seemed to know everything, and somehow stay humble about it. She listened in a way that made you feel like you were the only person in the room.
I remember the barn swallows. She'd talk about how they ate up the mosquitos. I remember the chickens, the dogs, the flower gardens she tended with quiet care. I remember Thanksgiving dinner. Christmas dinner. All of us kids running around outside while the adults did what adults do. I remember the smell of her cooking and learning — really learning — how to make a bed properly. She crocheted constantly, giving things away to anyone who needed something warm.
She seemed to live intentionally. That's the only word for it. In a world full of noise, she was deliberate. Compassionate, but grounded. Wise, but never showy about it.
"She believed in me when believing in me required some imagination."
I had some real struggles as a kid. Instability, moving around, falling behind. The kind of childhood that can go sideways fast if nobody's paying attention. She was paying attention. She was encouraging and positive about everything — not in a hollow, cheerful way, but in a way that felt like she actually saw something in you worth encouraging. She told me to keep learning. To make something of myself. She said it like it was already true.
My dad Carl and I lived with her for a while. That time shaped me more than I probably knew at the time.
I never knew of any tension in the family until I was much older. That says everything. Whatever was hard, she absorbed it. Whatever was fractured, she quietly held together. She was the strength underneath everything, and most of us didn't see it until later.
My father, Carl, was a different kind of influence. Where my grandmother was warmth, my dad was curiosity. Where she taught me how to be, he taught me how to think.
He read everything he could get his hands on. Books, constantly. Science, history, whatever Andre Norton was putting out. He had me reading Andre Norton too — the Grand Dame of science fiction — before I was old enough to fully appreciate what I was reading. He watched Star Trek obsessively. We both did. The Enterprise wasn't just a TV show in our house. It was a framework. A way of thinking about what's possible, what exploration looks like, what it means to build something and go somewhere new.
When I fell behind in school — from moving around, from instability — he hired a tutor. He didn't write me off. He invested. That tutor started me on physics. Advanced science. Language arts. And spelling. Every test I aced earned me a piece of a 31-volume Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia set. 1983. Beautiful books. I earned them one A at a time.
"I read through all 31 volumes. Wrote reports on words. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to know."
Those encyclopedias became everything to me. I wrote reports on words throughout the entire set. Physics. Science. Language. I became an ace speller. Not because school demanded it — because my dad had modeled what it looked like to devour knowledge, and I caught the same hunger.
I have been a starving autodidact my entire life. Eager to learn, eager to know, never quite satisfied with what I already understand. That came from watching Carl. From Star Trek in the background. From Andre Norton on the shelf. From a man who believed that if you kept reading, kept learning, kept asking — you'd get somewhere worth going.
Inside the AXIOM platform that powers all ForVera products, there is a knowledge system called CARL — the Complete Access Resource Library. It knows a lot about a lot.
It is named after my father. The man who thought he knew everything, and often genuinely did know a remarkable amount about a remarkable number of things. CARL is a loving, tongue-in-cheek tribute to a man who never stopped reading.
He would probably appreciate it. He might also have opinions about the architecture.
In 1999, I started releasing music. CDs, back when that was still the thing. Every single one had the same quiet addition somewhere near the bottom of the liner notes, usually in small type, usually easy to miss if you weren't looking:
It wasn't a brand. It wasn't a strategy. It was just true. Everything I made, I made with her somewhere in the back of my mind. The encouragement she gave me. The belief she had when belief required some imagination. The simple instruction to keep learning and make something of myself.
I kept the tradition across every project. Every album. Every book. Every release. And in 2016, when I started building ForVera into something larger than a personal dedication, the name was already there. It had been there for seventeen years. It was always the right name. I just needed to grow into it.
Today, ForVera Media LLC is the planet. Home base. The origin point for everything that gets built under this name. Music, books, publishing, creative work — it all lives here. It is the reason the whole operation exists.
ForVera Studio is the ship. The USS Enterprise of the operation. The technology arm that builds the systems, the platforms, the custom applications. The AXIOM framework — named for a concept I've carried since I was 16, a self-evident truth — is the operating system the ship runs on. The Command Center is the Bridge. Watchtower is the sensor array. CARL is the ship's computer. Forerunner is the probe sent ahead to test the systems. And Vera is the planet we launch from every single time.
"I envisioned AXIOM as my USS Enterprise. I needed to power the ship, hone the systems, and forge a place where I could let my mind roam, create, and feel proud of what I can build."
The whole ForVera universe — every domain, every product, every system — carries her name. Not loudly. Not in a way that needs explaining. Just there, quietly, the way she always was.
Some people search for ForVera and find a digital agency. Some find a music catalog. Some find a book. Some find a scheduling tool or a short-link service. They're all the same thing. They're all the kid who was told to keep learning and make something of himself, doing exactly that.
Vera Alice Connett passed away, but she never really left. She's in the name. She's in the intention. She's in the quiet discipline of building something that matters, something that lasts, something worth being proud of.
If you've ever found this page looking for "Forever Studio" — you're not wrong. ForVera is my forever. It always has been.