I knew, before going into it, that March was going to be a very, very strange and probably stressful month this year. I’m far enough into this job now that I know that any time a convention pops up into the schedule, it throws everything around it into disarray, whether or not I’m traveling to the show and doing it in person, or editing other people’s work from afar. The thing was, March didn’t just have one convention — it had three. (Technically, four, but I’ll get to that in a second.)
The first of those conventions was the only one that I attended in person, and was arguably the least disruptive of all of them. After all, I’ve done Emerald City Comic Con on and off for… well, more than a decade, easily, by this point; even though this year’s show was relatively unusual because my work duties shifted further away from actually writing and more towards managing and editing and other things, I still know the lay of the land and the rhythms of that show to not have been thrown entirely by it. (That said, I still had the strange thing where I went to something that’s at least adjacent to a comic show and didn’t actually read any comics; I blame my need for sleep.)
It was after ECCC that things went south. I came back exhausted, both by the show and oddly psychically drained by Spring Forward and the clocks changing, so the entire next week was rough — especially because I basically didn’t have any time off after the show but worked a week as soon as I got home. But that week and the next were also hardcore planning for C2E2, the show in Chicago at the end of March, to the point where in order to hit deadlines for prep I worked a 16-hour day at one point — and that 16-hour work day happened to take place (and, sadly, be genuinely necessary) after I’d failed to sleep more than four hours or so the night before because of a cat barfing right next to me. It was not a fun time.
Yeah, that also happened between ECCC and C2E2: my sleep schedule went to shit, as the change in seasons (and, more importantly, light levels and temperatures) made by all-too-sensitive body forget how to sleep through the night without waking up at multiple times and fail to get comfortable. In the three week period between those two shows, I think I made it through the night without waking up before 5am maybe… twice? It might actually only have been one time. I don’t know what to tell you; I am bad at sleep.
Something else that happened in those three weeks: another convention. MegaCon was another show I wasn’t working in person, but instead editing other people from home — but it did mean that I worked through the weekend again; I actually only got a Saturday and Sunday off once in the entire month of March this year, somewhat surreally, although I did get comped other days to make up for it in a weird, fragmented way.
Oh, and like I said — there was a fourth show in the mix that I was attached to as an editor, but PAX East took place at the same time as C2E2, meaning that I was paying attention to livestreams and notes from writers (and stories from writers, and breaking news from shows) in two separate timezones across the same long weekend stretch.
At one point in the middle of the month, someone pointed out that it was, in fact, literally the middle of the month. How did that happen, we both asked each other. Wasn’t it just February the other day? Now that it’s almost April, I find myself wondering if March even happened in the background of everything else that was going on, or if I just imagined the whole thing.