When I first started to build the worlds of Vesalius, Eurylae, The Rhadamanthines and The Council of Light, the working title was always The Realms. Later, and in true Sean Parker fashion, I shortened it to simply Realms. The site is almost ready for primetime, and I’m in that wonderful spot where, two weeks from launch, I can pay attention to all the finer details, and even spend some time experimenting with audio narrations to bring the stories even greater visceral impact. It’s an exciting time, and the launch date has been set for, of course, Halloween - Monday October 31st 2022.

I’m starting to ramp up more of a communal set of engagement as part of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Program, which has been incredible so far, and we’re only on day 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 from. I’ve also been experimenting more with Instagram in parallel, but had felt as if my presence there was languishing, and my reach there hovering around a pretty anemic hundred or so followers. Over the past weekend I tried an experiment of getting one of the larger MidJourney accounts to share my work as a paid post. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I am thrilled with the results, which more than quadrupled (OK, OK, I know it’s off a small base), and I’m now around 550 followers, most of whom are organic and very engaged with the wider MidJourney community. The test helped me find my people.

As part of reaching so many new accounts, 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 I felt that little spike of adrenaline which always happens when you know you need to do something unexpected. Looking up Realms on Amazon, the poster was right. Realms is a very cool-looking magazine created entirely with AI being sold on Amazon.

I’m 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 community early, to really get this kind of feedback’. 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. 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 the Browns in 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’. The 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 ‘chromarealms.com’ domain name, it turned out eurylae.com was available. It was perfect. Thankfully Squarespace 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 Crimson Realm became the Crimson Saga, and so on throughout as many pages as I could. Footer artwork needed to be updated to use saga instead of realms. But in parallel, I also needed to let the original commenter know that this was my problem, not theirs. So I DM’d them and let them know I felt the right thing to do was for me to change my project’s name, and that I would take care of everything. Thankfully Christopher could not have been more accommodating and generous about the misunderstanding. If you want to see what he’s been making, please do check out the Realms on Amazon and give them a read.

So that’s the story of the name change, 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 here as an artifact of pre-production, and a reminder that getting feedback early, doing the right thing by someone, and letting the universe guide you in truly unexpected way is always a good idea.