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It felt like an eternity getting here, but Tuesday is finally the day that we see whether or not the SciFi Channel experiment to change its name and create a brand identity is going to work.

When NBC Universal announced last March that it was going to rebrand itself "Syfy," a name that I created by the way, fandom simply exploded. But in the end, it wasn't as bad as anyone expected, and a week or so of negative backlash turned into not so much backlash at all.

In fact, with the official brand changeover just days away, it almost seems that the fan anger and fans' confidence lacking that this whole idea could actually succeed as burnt out. And I couldn't be happier.

During the backlash, I was one of the apparent minority voices out there that said the name should be embraced, and that NBCU should be allowed to at least give "Syfy" a chance. While they were definitely turning the name "into a typo," as the Web site io9 so cleverly put it, it's still pronounced the same.

Of course, I got blasted back, with people believing that NBCU had paid me to support it, or that in the purchase agreement, I had no choice but to support it. When I signed the agreement to sell NBCU the name, I had no idea that it was even NBCU, let alone what they had planned for it. As far as I knew, it was a company that wanted to use the "SyFy Portal" name that we had built into a solid brand on our own over the last decade as a way to make their own news legitimate. When NBCU announced they were using the name for the SciFi Channel, I was just as surprised as the rest of you.

But even if someone had asked me to sign an agreement that I would give something my full-fledged support, I still wouldn't do it. That's not the way I am. Either I like it or I don't.

I remember Rod Roddenberry, the son of the late "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry, telling me that soon after J.J. Abrams took over the movie franchise, he had a bite to eat with Roddenberry, hoping that either Roddenberry could lend some support to the film, or if he couldn't, at least not rile up the fanbase. Rod made it clear: Make the movie amazing, and you have nothing to worry about. Abrams held up his end of the deal, and so did Roddenberry.

The sad part about this whole thing, still, is that NBCU is still doing whatever it can to try and make it look like they created "Syfy." Of course, just about anyone reading this knows the real history of the name and where it came from, but I really hope that doesn't get forgotten. It's funny, because when some news outlets did mention SyFy Portal, they would also point out other variations of the spelling used by companies, including "Syfi" (which is pronounced SY-fee, by the way).

Of those variations, none of them were as exact as "SyFy" and none of them were used as a variant of the word "sci-fi." So I think it's more than safe to say that NBCU did not originate the idea of using "Syfy" in the place of "sci-fi."

At the same time, I have a hard time believing that someone could independently create the word with the same pronunciation and same spelling as a variant to "sci-fi" as NBCU later claimed after it became clear that we had been using the name for years. I'm just a writer, not an English scholar, but pronouncing a "Y" using an "eye" sound without some other modifying letter (like an "E" for example) just isn't common, if really even existent. In fact, when you look at how "Syfy" is written, the first way many people would look to pronounce it is "see-fee."

Developing a name wasn't easy. When I was planning out the site that would become "SyFy Portal," I wanted to use the term "sci-fi," but I didn't want to spell it that way. I didn't like how there was always a question on if there was a hyphen or not, if there should be a space between the two abbreviations or not, and so on.

The first variant I had come up with and wanted to use terribly bad was "Psi Phi." I loved it, and loved the Greek motif I could've used. However, I wasn't the first person to think of that, and at the time, there was a very popular genre book site that used that name.

So I went through a number of ideas in my head, and then in my brainstorming, for some reason, started thinking about Lynyrd Skynyrd. It was a crazy spelled name, but something that was memorable both because it sort of rhymed, and the Y's really set it off. Especially with the Y's lower case, you suddenly had four letters that dipped below the baseline of the word, and those little hooks are something that can be catchy to the eye.

I liked the fact that despite the way it's spelled, people knew to pronounce it "LEH-nard SKIN-nerd," (of course it didn't hurt that they had an album called pretty much that).

For "sci-fi," you already had the rhyme, and all you really needed was the little hook at the below the baseline of the word -- something you wouldn't have otherwise if you simply used the correct spelling.

Unfortunately, there is only one vowel or near-vowel that has the hooks at the bottom, and that's the "Y," just as Lynyrd Skynyrd had discovered 30 years before. And while it wouldn't seem natural to pronounce "SyFy" as "sci-fi," I felt it was worth a shot to see if we could "train" readers to do it. And we did.

Now, could NBCU have somehow gone through that same exact thought process? Maybe. I mean, they say if you put 1 million monkeys together and had them typing for an eternity or something like that, one of them is bound to type out a Shakespearean play. But I find it unlikely.

Does that make the name bad? Absolutely not. But if they saw how well we used the name, and liked the idea that we had created something that could be branded, why not just acknowledge it? Why not just say, "Hey, they really showed how the name could work, we liked it, and now we're going to use it ourselves." It's called capitalism ... if you can't create something, you can buy it. How do you think MS-DOS came into existence? Bill Gates didn't sit down and create it ... he bought it from someone else. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn't sit down and create a graphical interface desktop, they bought it from Xerox.

There's nothing wrong with buying good ideas. I mean, isn't that one of the reasons why people create good ideas in the first place? They hope to either find a lot of success with that idea, or to sell it to someone who might be able to take it to the next level. NBCU did just that, and hopefully it will all work out for them.

It was funny ... NBCU said once they created the name, they went around and bought up the name wherever else it might appear on the Internet, and that their purchase from me was simply one of those buy ups. As someone who spent a decade vigorously defending the trademark of "SyFy," I can tell you that if they bought up the name from anyone else who was not me (outside of the people who owned "syfy.com," which was simply because we didn't have the funds 11 years ago to pay for the domain name when they would run about $100 annually), that there wasn't much else out there.

I want it NBCU to succeed with "Syfy," and I think they will. "Warehouse 13," which premieres Tuesday, has a lot of promise, and the pilot is actually very entertaining. We've all seen "Caprica" already, and that looks great. And in just a few months, "Stargate: Universe" premieres, and that's going to be amazing.

And don't forget about some of their great returning shows, especially "Eureka," which premieres new episodes a week from today.

I think Syfy is in a great position to be a market dominator. And no matter what is said out there, I will always be proud of creating the name "Syfy" and then watching it grace a network that I hope we all will be proud of.