The Importance of Early Feedback

As a creator, my passion is to build experimental immersive stories with artificial intelligence and machine learning. When I first started to build the rich worlds inhabited by Vesalius, Eurylae, The Rhadamanthines and The Council of Light, the working title was always The Realms. Later, in true Sean Parker fashion, I shortened it to simply Realms. The site which houses all of my stories, characters, places and protagonists is almost ready for primetime, and I’m in that wonderful spot where, a week from launch, I can pay attention to all the finer details, and even spend some time experimenting with audio narrations to bring the stories to life in new ways. It’s an exciting time, and the launch date has been set for, appropriately, Halloween - Monday October 31st 2022.

As many of you here know, I’m starting to ramp up more of a communal set of engagement as part of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Program, which has been an incredible experience so far, and we’re only on week two! The cohort is engaged, super helpful, and while much of the work takes me out of my comfort zone, I know this discomfort is where growth is going to come. I've been slowly sharing out some of the visuals I've been working on, and teasing out some of what's to come. It's been a fun and incredibly helpful way to gather early feedback outside of more private conversations where I've shared the site with close colleagues and some trusted friends.

It's been a place where I can ask questions such as 'does this actually make sense?' or 'what would you improve?' or 'how did you find the journey of exploring the different sagas?' I'm much more interested in the material feedback about improvement than folks telling me that they like what they see. That's wonderful to hear of course, but the feedback around what to change is where it's at. It makes the work better, and is incredibly refreshing for a journey which for the most part has been a solitary adventure (so far).

I was particularly thrilled to have so many people reach out and comment about how good they felt the work looked, yet one comment drew my attention more than most. It simply read ‘Realms is also the name of my Midjourney produced anthology comic being sold on Amazon’. It had simply never even occurred to me that someone else would be doing MidJourney work with the same name, and when it arrived I felt that little spike of adrenaline which always happens when you know you need to do something unexpected. That 'Oh Sh!t' moment. Looking up Realms on Amazon, the poster was dead right. Realms is a very cool-looking magazine created entirely with AI being sold on Amazon.

At the time I was two weeks from launch, with a whole inventory of promotional assets ready to go. A website near ready, and the beginnings of some pre-launch activities starting to happen. But the product manager in me thought, ‘this is exactly why you put things out into the world early, to really get this kind of feedback. It's uncomfortable, but you want this’. Thank goodness I knew about it now, and not in a few weeks when the exposure (and damage) would have been far, far greater. But what was I going to do?

The main thing to do right now was to change the name. This was my problem, and it was important to own it. And it had to be changed everywhere. The first thing to address was, what was it going to change to? What would still capture the spirit of Realms, without compromising or diluting what I’d been making? What might be unique enough to stand alone while still capturing the spirit of the worlds I’d built? I paced. And paced. It was late, and I’d just driven the 450 miles back home from Cleveland after getting about 40 minutes of sleep the entire weekend after two Guardians games and an afternoon watching my beloved Browns from the Dawg Pound. I was tired, but this wasn’t going to wait. Even if I did go to bed I’d just lie there thinking about this.

And thankfully, it did come to me. I’d name the project after its main character, Eurylae, and add a subtitle of ‘The Chroma Saga’, which is an indirect homage to one of the original inspirations for the project, Henry Darger. A creative framework of building the worlds around different colors had been there since the beginning, but been lost along the way, and it was time to bring it back. So Realms changed to Eurylae: The Chroma Saga. Now came the work to actually make that happen, and in moments like this, sometimes the universe just has a way of looking after you. Instead of using the clunky chromarealms.com domain name, it turned out eurylae.com was available. It was perfect. Thankfully the company I use for hosting made the entire process from domain purchase to ‘use this name with this site’ so easy I had it taken care of in about 20 minutes, most of which was waiting for the request to process. Then came the work to update all the URLs and page content to reflect the removal of Realms. So the Noir Realm became the Noir Saga, and so on throughout as many pages as I could.

But in parallel, I also needed to let the original commenter know that this was my problem, not theirs. So I messaged them and let them know I felt the right thing to do was for me to change my project’s name, and that of course I would take care of everything. Thankfully they could not have been more accommodating and generous about the misunderstanding (or simple lack of awareness). If you want to see what they've been making, please do?check out the Realms on Amazon and give them a read.

So that’s the story behind the name, but I think that rather than try to hide that this happened, I want to celebrate it as part of the (mid) journey, so I’m going to leave all the original Realms artwork on my site as part of the pre-production diary I'll be making available. But more so as a reminder that getting feedback early, doing the right thing by someone who is generous enough to reach out, and letting the universe guide you in truly unexpected ways is always a good idea.

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