GenCon 2015 is complete. I’m on my way home now. Once I arrive I’ll need to unpack my suitcases and settle myself back into my at-home life. My head is full of business thoughts, promotional thoughts, conversations I had, tasks I need to accomplish, and dozens of other things. I’ll have to unpack all of that too. These thoughts will need to be sorted and settled into their proper places. Right now my brain is like a Rush Hour game where I have to slide all of the thoughts around each other to attempt to free a single one from the tangle of all the others.
It was very good that I got to come this year. The most important thing I did was spend time with our booth team and cement those friendships. We are very blessed to have fallen in with amazing people who have skills and personalities that mesh very well with each other. The team has been working well together for years, so I had a very light work load in relation to running the booth. This freed me up to extend our professional presence out into other areas of the convention. I got to go play. I participated in the writer’s symposium. I was able to spend time talking with Monica Valetinelli and Shanna Germain who both had very good advice for how to make sure that Planet Mercenary appeals to gamers who are not already Schlock fans. I met lovely new people, reconnected with some Writing Excuses Retreat attendees. I got to hug friends who were having a hard time. I laughed a lot and didn’t cry at all. That last point may seem like not a big deal, but it is. A big convention like GenCon can be overwhelming, and in the last six months I’ve been easily overwhelmed. But I wasn’t this weekend, and that is a triumph all by itself.
Now I must transition from a GenCon head space back to my regular work. It is a little bit daunting. All of the tasks for GenCon were concrete and self-contained. The tasks of daily life are large, complex, and often sloppy. There is a part of me that would like to just stay where things are simple, but that would not help me achieve my long term goals. So I’ll go forward through the complicated and daunting. Onward.