There was legitimate, actual news from the comics industry yesterday — a development that not only took many people (including myself!) by surprise, but also is likely to have significant repercussions for a lot of people, including potentially threatening companies — and it was the first time in a number of years where that’s happened and I’ve been on the sidelines, instead of reporting on it. It’s fair to say that I really didn’t like that experience.
Part of me wondered if my frustration at just being a bystander was an ego thing, and that I missed the opportunity to have people turning to me for information and a small amount of snark. I suspect there’s some level of that, because why wouldn’t there be…? But there’s something more to it, I think (I hope); I missed the ability to try and parse out what was real and what wasn’t, to ask the questions I had about the whole thing and find out answers and try to get into the weeds about the whole matter.
That’s not to say that I don’t think other people were doing the same thing, or that I would be the only person trying to get exactly the same questions answered — so, again, I suspect that we’re getting back into the area of ego. Only I can ask exactly the right questions to make this happen! And yet… there really was some degree of that, to my shame. I wanted others to stop getting distracted by the wrong things, or to make leaps of logic that didn’t make sense (to me, at least).
Instead, I was left frustrated and thinking if only to myself more than once, and wishing that emails would arrive asking to give me money to write about it at some point during the day. They didn’t, and I didn’t. Instead, I return to the idea that there’s a bigger story connected to this one that I should be researching and pitching, before everything goes to hell and I lose my chance.