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We already mentioned it on the comic blog for this week but I know there’s a few of you out there who only mosey by to see what’s spilled out of my brain here week-to-week, so I’ll reiterate: we’re headed back to San Diego Comic-Con’s Small Press Pavilion for 2017!
Now it’s true, we’ve managed to get in twice before in the last six years or so of diligently applying, but in both those cases we didn’t make the first selection cut, instead getting the opportunity to sub in because someone else had to cancel. This year marks our first occasion of outright approval, and that’s not only one heck of a nice feeling, it also solves a big looming problem we were going to have to deal with because our usual hotel was undergoing renovations next year and was going to be unable to accommodate us. We always expected that might happen sooner or later because every year was a special favor from the manager to rent us one of their few rooms that was available outside the Comic-Con hotel block. We paid through the nose for it, naturally, but the peace of mind always felt worth it. In 2017 though they’d have nothing to spare, so while I thanked the manager for her early warning (and her bringing up that hopefully in 2018 they could help us out again) we were going to be in the regular scrum for 2017, a scrum which we’d dipped our foot into this year just out of curiosity and learned that the “downtown” hotels go bye-bye within less than three minutes of reservations opening. Seriously, for people that qualify for pro status it’s not the tickets that are the problem these years, it’s finding somewhere to stay.
But that’s the general scrum. There’s an earlier hotel scrum that occurs that’s only open to Exhibitors for the show, which makes sense when you consider they’re the people with the most stuff to lug and also the ones providing most of the products and entertainment. The problem with getting called up off the wait list is that both times we were, that scrum was long over. Fortunately, as noted above we had alternate arrangements in place. Those arrangements went belly up for 2017, but by timely chance, or maybe us getting better, or just sheer dogged persistence, our first-round approval means that we might be able to snag our favored hotel regardless… and at a much lower rate!
It might be premature to be excited about this, but I have a good feeling. We’ll see how it goes.