After the hotel meeting on Sunday and some discussion, we're sticking with what I think of as "the basics".

You want to be creative in convention planning but there are times to do that and there are times to stick with what works(pretty obvious I know, but the temptation to futz around always exists); you can end up doing something new just to show that you're not the guys who did it last year, or to "improve" on last time when it's really no improvement. (we call this reinventing the wheel, yes we do, and we’ve seen to much of it, oh yes we have.)

So we’ve gone with the standard – banquet to be held Saturday night. Following it will be the auction. As for Friday, it’s a reception and that’s about it – food, drink and mingling. If we have anything clever to offer, we’ll try it but we will not complicate it with award ceremonies, or speeches. No entertainment – at least not so far and probably not at all since it can interfere with the mingling part of things.

As for when things start and end – this IS a west coast regional convention. We tend to expect the main attendance to come from this region and we have to deal with the fact that airline flights from here will sometimes mean folks have to leave early. But if we don’t use the time we have, we’ll get complaints that there wasn’t enough program.

You should see the high tech planning methods I use. Starting with stupid little pieces of paper I have currently marked “Thursday”, “Friday”, “Saturday” “Sunday” each with an A, a B and a C and each with a time slot. And lots of Xs.

The X indicates a program item; A and B are “big ticket” major room programs, C is smaller room program. Starting at some time on Thursday afternoon, ending some time on Sunday afternoon. At some point – like on Friday and Saturday, we’ll have 3 Xs for most slots during the day. But we’ll probably taper on and off, especially on Saturday when we will need to STOP program so that they hotel folks can reset the room. Which takes time. (oh yeah, and money, did I mention? It will cost us to reset twice – once to form the banquet room, the other to recreate program rooms.) And we’ll start earlier on Saturday – probably – than we do on Friday. So like we start with one X the first thing on Thursday, then maybe have two Xs or 3 later on; on Friday afternoon we might taper down to 2 Xs late in the afternoon, or just 1. Ditto Saturday. Sunday we may offer 3 tracks. Or not.

During Bouchercon planning, I really did get complaints both that we were starting program too late AND that we were starting it too early. We heard that program went too late on Sunday AND that it didn’t go late enough. We’ll hear that we have too many tracks and we’ll hear that we don’t offer enough. Right now, I have a list of 30+ program items; I need nearly twice that in order to have some that we’ll have to throw out and to fill all the slots (which total SOMETHING like, darn what did I have 13 plus 22 plus 25 plus 11, more or less).

Remember when you wondered what went into convention planning? (our mantra? “it’ll be fine it’ll all work, it’ll be fine it’ll all work”) Pass the aspirin bottle, would you?

Aren’t you sorry you wondered?