Rose City Comic Con 2015 was my first comic con. The lack of substantive programming came as something of a surprise. Though they did have panels, the number of them compared to the attendance was quite low. The main draw of a comic con appears to be the show floor. At other cons, they call it the Dealer’s Room or Exhibition Hall. As a result, most of the people wandered the show floor most of the time. Because nothing drew them away, the food concession lines were atrociously long. Alas, the staff didn’t seem terribly well prepared to handle the number of hungry con-goers and exhibitors.
I spent this convention working the WordFire Press booth, who kindly hosted my new release, Al-Kabar
In a word, I’d call it “awkward.” I’m used to one of two situations. In the first, I know all the pitches for every book on the table, or pretty close to it. In the second, I know the pitches for about half the books and have reference material for the rest. Or the author standing nearby knows the rest well enough to handle those. In this situation, I knew some about a few of the 100+ books and only really knew the pitch for my own. Since it was someone else’s booth, I felt weird hawking my stuff and went to a different part of the table.
Beyond that, I’d only met a few of the people working in person before, mostly only briefly at Sasquan. It’s always weird to be among a group of people who are friends already when you’ve just met them. Everyone was cool and generally patient, but the way I do the thing is I apparently different from the way they do the thing, which probably made me sometimes seem more like a hindrance than a help. At least the Star Wars and Dune stuff doesn’t require a salesperson, just someone who knows what order the books go in, which is easy enough to learn quickly.
Finally, I’m really used to being generally responsible for the table I work. Although I helped with tear-down, I had nothing to do with set up and nothing to do with table maintenance or inventory management or control. Again, they do the thing differently than I do.
Despite all of this, I met some great people, saw some excellent cosplay, and had a good time. I managed to forget to eat lunch on Sunday, but suffered no ill effects due to a good breakfast. It’s possible that my feet hurt too much to notice my stomach being empty. I wore near-new boots that aren’t as excellent as my usual con shoes (but look a lot nicer) on the concrete floor without a break on Sunday, which was dumb, but happened anyway.
As a final note, I had a huge problem with my phone eating its battery down for no apparent reason in only 5 hours at Sasquan, so I replaced it. The new one didn’t need to be recharged all weekend. Yay!
Next stop: Steamposium on the 25th for the first official Clockwork Dragon event.
And now, some cosplay:
