Conventions are the reward for all the hours of work that Howard and I put in at home. At conventions we finally have faces and voices for people who were previously anonymous hits on the website. Conventions are where it all begins to feel real. It works the other way too. Howard and I become real to people who have only known us through our work. At every single convention I attend I meet several new and amazing people. Most of the time these amazing people are not the ones I hoped/expected to meet when I arrive at the event. LTUE had both Orson Scott Card and Gail Carson Levine as guests of honor. I never had the chance to speak to either one of them. I am sure that they are wonderful people, but they were always either surrounded or rushing off somewhere. Howard did speak briefly with them both and even gave Mr. Card a copy of Under New Management. That’s enough, we’re happy. Among the new amazing people are Darwin Garrison of Darwin’s Evolutions, Joselle Vanderhoof a local poet/author, and Christie Skipper Ritchotte who reads slush for Shimmer. I had marvelous conversations with each of them. Then of course there were all the familiar amazing people. I am very fortunate to live in a place with a strong creative community.
I always come home from conventions exhausted, but invigorated. I want to dive into new projects and take advantage of the new opportunities that I have learned about. But this year I need to be careful. My plate is already so full that stuff is falling off. I can not dive into new things until I have finished off some of the old ones. Even more important is that I not upset the structure that I worked so hard to set up during January. The last few days were chaotic for us all, but now the kids need me to be back to making dinner and enforcing homework. They need me to be available to help them with the hundreds of things that seem little to me, but are big for them. So the primary focus for this next week is to re-establish normal.
In the business parts of normal I need to do the math to figure out how much we made attending this convention and exactly what merchandise sold. This is important because I need to ship merchandise to the two conventions that Howard attends next month and I need to know how much to ship. Also I need to prepare for my meeting with the tax accountant on Tuesday. Regular accounting needs to be done. Regular shipping also needs to be done. I need to figure out how many shirts have been pre-ordered so that I can give a preliminary count to our shirt guy. I want to plan a layout for the Hold on to Your Horses website. And hopefully I can do some work on The Teraport Wars as well. Oddly, I’m not oppressed by the quantity of things on my list for the week, but instead I’m looking forward to it.