Positivity in rejection

[This somehow didn’t get published last week, though it was written out! Oof. Well, here it is anyhow — Clint]

So as you might recall, we full on got accepted into San Diego Comic Con 2019 as a jury selection for Small Press, as opposed to previous years where we still exhibited but had to be called up off the waiting list.

You have to go through the jury selection every year, but we had high hopes and were looking forwards to tabling in 2020 next to the great folks we met.

And… you guessed it, we opened up our letter from SDCC towards the end of last year and we were wait listed again. Sigh.

Now we have that good track record of getting called off the wait list, like I said, but there would be no guarantee of being in the same location. More importantly, we miss out on the crucial early hotel selection for exhibitors, and while we’ve been able to compensate for that in previous years, it’s always expensive and stressful.

So this time around Dawn and I searched our souls… did we want to once again push for being called up off the list? Or… maybe being turned down again like this was an opportunity? It’s been so long since we were able to just go to the big show as attending pros. And our niece expressed interest in going for the first time and this will be the last year she can do so for free. And there’s a horror convention called Midsummer Scream that people we know do really well at but we’ve never done it because it’s the weekend right after SDCC and we just never quite mastered being able to recover like that.

So rejection becomes opportunity, and for once we’ve resolved that this time around, even if we get the call from SDCC we probably will turn it down. It’s not like it seems to help us get in on any permanent basis, after all. Oh, we’ll of course submit our application again for next year, but for 2020 we’re basically ready to just take the break, have some unobligated fun with family, and then try out Scream as our exhibit show for the Summer.