Monday, October 7, 2013

Positive Unintended Consequences

Something I'll encourage everyone out there to do is to create things. If you have an idea and even a small piece of the capability to create what you've thought of, then you should. Sometimes, even the small and stupid things turn out to have uses. Sure, they'll probably also be small and stupid uses, but the fact that they have any use at all is what makes them worth creating.

This is one of those examples that is small and stupid, but the fact that it had any use beyond what I thought of it at first really made me think. As a recent post indicated, I do a lot of writing for The Red Shirt Crew, and a large part of the writing for that blog is reviewing comics. I realize that I'm largely serving as an extension of the Dark Horse marketing machine, but I'm okay with that, as the artists and writers also need that promotion. A time-consuming part of the process is linking to the personal webpages of all the artists and authors, so I created a spreadsheet with a list of all of them to make that easier. It served its purpose well, making that part of the process very simple, which is especially good when you're reviewing long series with lots of repeating creatives behind it. 

Stupidly, I didn't share it with the other writers for a long time. Eventually, I realized that I was just being an idiot and shared it with everyone else on the blog. They all loved the idea, but the thing that stuck out to me was from the writer who reviews Dark Horse Presents, their anthology series. Sometimes, it's difficult to track down exactly what other things an artist has worked on, but this allowed exactly that. I only added the series they worked on because it made it easier to find the names, but it turned out to have another good use that I never thought of that saved someone else a lot of time and effort.

Yes, it sounds like a small and stupid use, but everything has those uses. Everything you create might have those little things that you never thought about before, and that's one of the best reasons why you should create those things.

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