Putting up and shutting up

There's quite a few different levels of reaction to thinking something sucks. There's just ignoring it. There's getting ticked about it. There's developing seething hatred to the point of creating website dedicated to that seething hatred. There's many others but I'm thinking about one right now: "That sucked and I can do it better."

Oh I'm guilty of it as well. I started writing NIGHTWING scripts in reaction to Bruce Jones's run. Remember that one? When suddenly Dick Grayson decided to be a male model? I've been thinking about it a lot lately mainly due to my displeasure of a lot of what's going on over at DC Comics. My attention is on TITANS right now, and I've been pondering starting script writing to submit to the series. The effort would in all likelihood be fruitless as my work would never be accepted (they're not very keen on random submissions and I don't have anyone inside who'd vouch for me), but the urge is still there.

However if approached today by an editor and told, "I heard you're interested in writing a TITANS story. We need a fill in. What do you have?" I could get a pitch done and out within an hour. If that's accepted I could probably have a proposal together by the time they got back to me about the pitch. From there give me a few days and I'll have scripts done. This is not bragging, or an attempt to sound cool. It's not cool. It's what is expected of you if you're going back up saying "I can write this comic."

I got to thinking about all this after a chat with my friend Linda. Every year she puts together an online role-playing mystery. She puts a ton of time and effort into it. I know this because I've helped her with them a few times. Every year they go very well. Every year somebody gets frustrated and complains. This year one of the complainers asked if they could run the mystery next year. Linda and I both agree that this person has no idea what they are in for if they decide to go through with this.

It's tempting to want to be the cool person and pull off something neat that someone else has done. It's entirely another matter to understand what is going to be necessary to complete that task. That's the problem with saying you're going to "put up". It makes shutting up later much more difficult.