Just wrapped up New York Comic Con. It was an incred­ible expe­ri­ence and a busy one: 3 panels, 2 sign­ings and 1 dismal showing on a geek show that saw me failing to dis­play knowl­edge of geek trivia so mis­er­ably that they gave me a plushy squid just to keep me from pub­licly bursting into tears.

Now, you know me, I don’t really do con roundups, but I did have a thought I wanted to rumi­nate over:

Wed­dings can be tough. You have nearly everyone you love in the world in the same room, and they’re only going to be there for a few hours. You want to spend time with *all* of them, and you want it to be quality time. But there are only 60 min­utes in each hour, and you don’t want to blow anyone off, so you race around the room trying to be every­where and talk to everyone at once.

The result? More often than not, you get about 30 sec­onds — 1 minute of talking, fol­lowed by a hur­ried apology and rushing off to talk to the next person.

When you’re a pro­fes­sional writer, cons are like that.

You’re there, first and fore­most to WORK. You need to pro­mote your writing. You need to net­work with pub­lishers, artists, agents and other con­tacts in the field. You need to pass out busi­ness cards and swag. You have panels to mod­erate and speak on. You may have read­ings or sign­ings. There are other writers you want to gush over, learn from, trade tips with. It doesn’t help that many of these other pros are awe­some people who are also your friends and you want to hang out and chat with them.

But it’s a CON, so it’s also packed with scores of your per­sonal friends. You want to catch up with those people too. Some of them are there from out of town. At each con, there’s always at least one friend who you only get to see once or twice a year.

If you’re lucky enough to have fans, they want to meet you. They want more than just a quick hand­shake and nod. They want to talk to you about your work, they want to get to know you a little bit. You are so grateful that someone even read your book at all, let alone actu­ally wants to meet you/talk to you about it. You des­per­ately want to talk to them too. You write to com­mu­ni­cate, and these are the people you are com­mu­ni­cating with. Many of these fans are also your friends. Some of them are other pros.

So, what hap­pens? Just as with the wed­ding, you wind up trying to talk to everyone, and not really talking to anyone. You try so hard to make sure that you meet and schmooze and build/maintain rela­tion­ships that you spend the weekend racing around a hotel or con­ven­tion center, mostly saying, “excuse me for a moment,” or, “I’m really sorry, I wish I had more time to talk.” The WORST? When you catch your­self talking to someone you gen­uinely like/care about and you’re not making eye con­tact. Your eyes are over their shoulder, because you just spotted an out-of-town friend, or an industry rep that you MUST talk to and don’t know if you’ll get another chance.

Cons are amazing fun, but they’re also stressful and over­whelming. We want des­per­ately to be lik­able and gra­cious. We want to really interact (truly, not just sur­face pleas­antries), with every fan, friend and pro. I bet I’m not the only writer who wor­ries that my efforts to accom­plish this may some­times present pre­cisely the oppo­site impression.

Be patient with us.