OMGcon Never More

This post WAS going to be an analysis of bad character writing and why I don’t care for Arrow, but instead it begins with brief footage from the first and last time I attended OMGcon, which was one of the first times it was being held. It’s second annual I think it was. 2010 at any rate.

This was during the Akashik days, and judging by the book the person is holding it was early Akashik days. Their reaction really fueled my desire to write, and I’ve kept it all this time. I wasn’t going to post it because it had been lost and by the time I found it a lot of time had passed. But this blog post is about my attendance at OMGcon 2015 – or rather my lack of attendance this year and probably every year after that.

There’s just something about a reader that laughs at the work you intended to, well, make them laugh. If it hadn’t been for people like this, I would never have realized that hey! I’m a comedy writer! I’m funny! And I’m female! I’m a mythical funny female!! Ah… Those were the days.

In those days the table at OMGcon was affordable, and being as it was being held in Paducah, KY it was also very nearby. It was also very small, in case you can’t see from the film. And since then it has grown.

My first choice for the single convention I attend this year was OMGcon, being as I’m home after these years being stuck at Fort Polk with my husband. Boy have things changed. It’s gotten big, the kind of big that makes me think twice about attending in any capacity. The table is no longer affordable, and to get that table I had to audition. I felt like I was trying out for a part in some movie by showing them what little of my wares is online. And it hardly felt fair.

And I know from listening to people talk about the selection process at Dragoncon as well as having been on a table committee myself how these things usually work. You’re not vying to get a table based on your merit. You’re last in line after everyone *else* that has the same table year after year after year, and you might get lucky if there’s an empty slot. It’s usually not a fair selection process. It’s based on “but these people were here first” and personal politics. And I… am not a likeable person due to my forward nature. So whaddya gonna do except develop this internal picture that once you’ve been to one of those conventions one year, you’ve been to them for all the years because *nothing is gonna change*.

But this sort of thing, you get used to it after a while. It’s like a certain convention I attended in Louisiana two years in a row. They were really pushing this one guy’s stuff, and making him out to be some super artistic genius. He’d sit at his table with his renditions of other people’s characters and make some decent money, cuz everyone knows if you want to make it in the comic art biz you can’t start out being original. It was all about how he’d helped with this project or done that thing over there, and it was made out to be that he was the *only* local anybody who’d done anything.

Meanwhile there I was sitting humbly at my table with several published books, worldwide exposure, various quiet fans (seriously, guys, where are you??), and public projects in the works. Not blowing a single horn. Cuz, you know, that’s just not my way. I don’t like it. In fact, when people beef themselves up in the way I’ve described above I find it… I dunno… paper thin.

But I digress.

I was expecting a rejection. I got a rejection. Or rather, to put it in their terms, I got put on the waiting list for an open table. But at $120 smackeroos, I don’t think I care enough to try for it. That’s a lot of table fee to try to meet just to break even. So nothing against OMGcon and their big britches, but fuck that noise.

Seriously, I’m not broken up about this. I already knew what was going to happen so I found some smaller cons happening nearby and reached out to them. A month later I have gotten no response from any of them. Going to conventions around here is difficult for me to start with, because of a clash I had with the guys running most of them. They were rude to me, and I was running a fever of over 100 degrees that day. Guess who got told off, and guess who got blacklisted.

The one set of people that did contact me back acted like I was trying to pull their teeth just for me to find out when they were taking information for artist tables. All I got for them was that they weren’t getting ready for that convention yet. I was like yes, but WHEN?? Is there an email list, something? No response. Sigh.

Traveling crazy amounts of hours away just to attend a con isn’t something I can afford to think about doing, so I won’t. But it would be nice to attend that single con I like to get in. Although having stuff from the Heavenly Bride is chancy on the table due to the occasional adult nature, it’s still good to be able to get my stuff out there. There’s the books I’ve written that could go on the table… just… you know… published writer/artist stuff. The stuff that I do, right? Plus there’s my charms.

I had my first official charm sale the other day. Being as it’s been years since I did charms, that felt kind of good. It’s the little things that matter…

But so far bad luck on the convention situation. I miss Tsubasacon.