The Big Con
This months newsletter is devoted entirely to UKGE reflections.
This blog starts on a train back from UK Games Expo. I'm sitting in the wheelchair spot, after a a handful of other passengers successfully got a guy taking up all four seats with a bike to move. This blog won't end on the train. I make some notes about things I think could be interesting to the expand on when I get back to writing the post. How I found my first major con since using a wheelchair. A new release that I soft launched at the con and am feeling very excited back. Some thoughts on how I present "what I do" when people at cons ask me. These thoughts aren't really to be developed, on this train, on such little sleep, but it's where this blog begins.
Move forward one day. I'm lying in bed as even sitting in the arm chair in my room takes more energy than I have. My fatigue is particularly debilitating, and has been so all day. How did we get here?
Right, the con. The big con. I travelled down to Gexpo on a Thursday at the end of May, to exhibit as a trader for the first time. I was slowed down in the morning by a lightly stressful errand and missed my original train, but my ticket let me get on a later one and the train I'd originally booked was honestly earlier than I needed to get there. The journey from London to Birmingham was strenuous on the body, sure how could it not be, but it was going relatively well.
Let's go back to the present for a second. The present of the blog is one day forward again. Two days after I come home from the con. Things are mildly better, very mildly. My mind has been and is in a fog but some light breaks through. Light that makes me wonder about the purpose of this post. Overarchingly it's reflections on UK Games Expo. Reflections involve comparisons to other similar experiences (working the same con in prior years, and trading at other cons). These are comparisons everyone's Gexpo reflection blogs make. Though of all my personal reflections are shaded by the new factor being a wheelchair user, a thing I've not mentioned in the newsletter or blog because all the posts have so far been about writing, so it's simply not come up. There's a moment of hesitation. Writing a blog post about how a con was after getting back feels natural, but what's the purpose of the sharing? Things like raw numbers are about advice. So is tips or pointers on things to bring. This isn't advice though¹, is it just complaining? Let's figure that out before the end, but giving complaining a try couldn't hurt.
I found Birmingham to be a very inaccessible city. It's very hilly, and cobblestoned, and drop curbs seemed far rarer than in London and honestly bumpier. The NEC itself was mostly flat on the inside, though the same can't be said for the outside and the exhibitor parking had no disabled parking spots, which seems inconsiderate, in the same way it felt inconsiderate that the UKGE website's accessibility information only has details for attendees and the exhibitor portal includes no additional info for disabled traders.
None of these things are hugely within my control, though not all of them are things that have to be this way. There are ways I can mitigate some strain better in the future. I can see theres not a version of the world where I did Gexpo without the chair and it just hurt more, I simply wouldn't have been able to do it. I wonder if how I've approached cons before has contributed to where my baseline of health is right now. I remember a conversation I had with a friend in passing on the last day of GenCon in 2023, where I said I'd probably done too much "but what can you do?". I remember they replied "Do less, Kayla, please." That's kind of the only answer worth listening to. I don't have to try so hard.
Cons are stressful and I can see how my con had some extra stressful things. My phone was broken at one point. My wallet was lost at another. Multiple disabilities that are all made worse by stress. Grade it on a scale. I'm the calmest woman alive. So I actually had a good time.
My two biggest selling titles were PSYCHODUNGEON and Out of the Fold & Other Games. I am actually almost out of my stock of PSYCHODUNGEON so will have to rearrange a new print run before my next con. I'm proud of how far the game seems to have travelled, and I enjoyed talking to people about the game, especially some people who I'd handed flyers to while the game was Kickstarting last year. The title and cover did a lot for pulling people in, and the full pitch does connect, though I wonder if I could come up with a more succinct elevator pitch. I also wonder if I could jazz up presentation on the stand, make more of a display for the game.
Out of the Fold & Other Games is new. After Dragonmeet Call to Adventure I was nearly out of To Embrace a Swamp Creature and wanted to print a new paperback so I had two on offer. I considered reprinting Swamp Creature but as good as it is I've found that it struggles to stand out next to PSYCHODUNGEON, being a less accessible game that touches on similar ground. I didn't have other obvious titles that'd print as a book rather than a zine, so the idea came of paring four games in an anthology.
Out of the Fold made sense as a lead title for the collection, the limited zine run had sold well and was basically gone so that also needed to be printed again, and it was a good starting point to build out the rest of the collection from, the task became finding three more titles that would compliment Out of the Fold. I looked through my back catalogue for more games using exclusively playing cards, that weren't currently in print. Save Our Souls had never been printed, An Illustrator's Guide to the Dreamtlands was out of stock. Both worked well in the book as they were, the task for adding those two was mainly welding the layout to something more cohesive throughout a whole text; namely the body text was changed to be uniform with Our of the Fold and they both adopted that games page number style.
The fourth game gave me the chance to do a remix of a previous title (Thirty Foes) that had a lot of promise, but I felt I'd make differently now. It presented an interesting set of constraints as I had to make the new version work with only cards and pen and paper to fulfill the promise of the book. I'd actually thought about revisiting Thirty Foes before, it's a game I've always had fun playing but it sounds complicated when I pitch it. The new version, Once again, we are defeated, resolves this. The reason I hadn't got around to revisiting the game before was worrying it was just tinkering too much with the past, rather than moving on, for possibly little reward if it still ended up a little known gem. But doing that within a collection felt different. It also felt like it put less pressure on the game as it's not the title that's mainly selling the book to people.
I'm very satisfied with the resulting book, as collection I think its interesting, cohesive, approachable and completely itself. This format is something I'm interested in doing more of in the future. In a previous blog I mentioned I was finding more satisfaction in creating smaller, self contained games. This feels like a nice way of balancing following creative whims wholeheartedly while having books I can sell for more money (and are good value for that money). I might have something along these lines coming along the horizon sooner rather than later.
So, physically challenging and mentally draining but there's fulfillment to be found there, hopefully that lasts longer than the flare up the con causes. I know ways I can and mitigate the risk of flares in the future, but writing it down would basically be taking a turn into lifestyle blogging. The shape and structure of this post is already pretty contorted, I'm not sure it can take much more. Not wanting to get too personal is also why I'm not really reflecting on social highlights, a thing I really valued from my con experience. Maybe I do have stray advice though.
Buy kneepads for your con bag, floors are gonna be hard on your knees while you pack and unpack boxes.
Once you're back, make a list of everything you you forgot. For me this was a phone charger, a sleeping mask, and a set of batteries. Not bad all things considered. Maybe TableTop Scotland can be the first three days con where I forget nothing.
Make a list of places you want to see before you go. I kept saying I'd do it there, never had the energy, and ended up not checking out some friends stalls I really wanted to see.
If you're walking around while looking down at your phone, keep your ears peeled. You might find it very embarrassing if a woman in a wheelchair has to shout at you to watch where you're going because you ignored the first three times she asked politely.
If you want to apologize to someone because you didn't see you were in their way, remember that it can really undercut the apology if you call the person you're speaking to (who you do not even know) "Wheels".
If you can't find a water fountain, in my experience, the food places at the edges will fill up your water bottle too.
I noticed people didn't feel comfortable flipping through the display copy of Our of the Fold, even when I mentioned it was a display copy, until I put a sticker on it spelling it out, so that's something to bare in mind for soft covers.
On the surface writing about how I describe "what I do" might seem to replicate material from last months blog. Except they're different questions. Last month was about how I see myself, and about depth and themes. Describing "what I do to" to people is more about an approachable summary. It's answer changes in different lights. On a TTRPG interview podcast it can be more specific. At a convention not so much. I guess there's also a presumed buy-in in most other contexts. At a con the subtextual tag is "and why should I care". There's the challenge of not being able to just say "fantasy games" or "sci-fi games", "weird games" feels too broad and kinda shallow, "personal games" feels like it's bringing in more vulnerability than I maybe want to share with hundreds of people each day. I say self-contained games, I emphasize that they're independent and virtually every part of my books is made by me, and depending on who I'm talking to I then focus on things like story, or approachability, or the one shot focus. I tried out describing my games as "character focused and emotionally charged" this weekend. It feels accurate, and gives some indication, though maybe it's still a little up itself. It's not that succinct. Though I'm not sure being more succinct is an achievable aim. Being honest is a worthy consolation prize. Sir, we know our song's good, do we have a deal or not?
Where is the blog ending up? It's Thursday, the fourth day since I returned from the con. It's raining, my birthday was yesterday, I'm finishing the blog as a thirty-year old woman. A slight cold I picked up has mostly faded, which let's me see how much of what I'm feeling is a fibro flare. The post has most moved backwards, forwards, backwards again, and so on. It's not always been linear but we've moved a little further bit by bit. It's like recovery. The difference is that the post ends here.
1. With that said, if you think you'd benefit from using a wheelchair, my advice there is start using one.