Conventional Wisdom

(Historical Notes: Okay, here’s where the stuff REALLY starts.  With the cost of traveling to cons getting higher and higher, the pool of people I knew to travel out of state with getting smaller and smaller, and my general burn-out getting more and more severe, the time had come to make the harshest decision of all.  For LITERALLY the first time in Conventional Wisdom’s history, I wasn’t going to cover Otakon.  And the thing is, as bad as I felt about breaking the tradition, I honestly didn’t feel back about staying home at all.  I was so sick of the stress and the financial strain and all the drama everywhere and blah blah blah that staying home from such a major con felt like a MASSIVE weight off my shoulders.  Oh, if only I knew just how MANY cons I was about to end up taking a break from…

Actually, even setting aside all the pandemic stuff, Past Me was still operating a bit of a bad set of assumptions here.  For a while up to this point, I’d been looking for more and more ways to phase out the stress and expense of big conventions and transition over to just going to little local events.  I mean, just look at what I wound up doing INSTEAD of Otakon for what an extreme pivot I was looking to make.  But here’s the thing: even before this point, Conventional Wisdom’s traffic had been slumping waaaaaaaaaaay down.  This was actually one of the reasons I was losing motivation to head out to the big cons, but I didn’t realize just much it was ME causing that slump by NOT going to the big cons.  Random Little Raleigh Con just isn’t going to attract the same attention as something like Otakon on its own, and I’d badly miscalculated just how much of Conventional Wisdom’s readership was showing up because they wanted to see me talk about just ANY ol’ con.  The answer is “very few,” most folks just wanted to hear about the con THEY were at, and most people weren’t at Random Little Raleigh Con.

Now, I still do prefer the smaller, closer, cheaper, less stressful experience of going to a little local con over a big out-of-state one, but NOW I’m looking to pull off more of a balance of at least one really big con per year, with a smattering of smaller ones to pad things out.  In fact, in an AMAZING coincidence, I’m writing this very commentary mere hours after putting down money to book a hotel for Otakon 2023!  So let’s see what the future holds for that!  I mean, the LAST time I started making plans to go back to Otakon, it caused a global pandemic…)