Youmacon 2019
Youmacon is a large anime convention held every year at the Renaissance Center and TCF Center (formerly Cobo Center) in Detroit on the weekend closest to Halloween. This year it was held over the weekend of October 31 to November 3.
Because setup starts at noon on Thursday, we drove up on Wednesday. It was raining when I carried our personal belongings out to the van, and the rain continued pretty much continuously all the way up to Fort Wayne, then across Ohio to Toledo, where we stopped at the Sam's Club to get gas. By that point my leg was getting pretty tired from having to push the accelerator pedal, but with the rain still going, I couldn't really put the cruise control on as we continued to Livonia and the mall where we could stop at Vitamin World to pick up some more vitamins.
Then we continued on surface streets up to our hotel. After our trouble with the hotel where we stayed for Michigan Comic Con, we'd decided to go back to the hotel in Southfield where we'd stayed in 2018. We arrived right about suppertime, and while we were able to check in reasonably easy, the desk clerk was uncertain about whether we'd be able to pay cash when we checked out. However, he was new at the job and suggested we talk to a more senior manager.
The rain was still coming down, although fairly lightly, but enough to make it interesting to get our personal belongings into our room. Once everything was in and the bell cart was returned to the lobby, I fixed our supper and settled in to do some more work online. I also did some work on a novelette I'm rewriting for indie publication. When I got stuck, I decided to re-read the existing text and see if there were other areas more amenable to reworking. I found an astonishing number of logic holes, some minor but others big enough that the would need to be rectified at much earlier points in the story.
On Thursday we got up and had the hotel's complimentary breakfast. Then we got ready and headed downtown to get in line at the TCF Center loading dock. While we sat and waited, I went through my e-mail on the iPhone, trying to get rid of some of the old stuff that had built up over the past several months while we were running to and from conventions and I didn't have time to mess with mail.
Finally they opened the gates and let us start driving in. I had an awkward moment with the dockmaster when the literal words of his question weren't what he was really asking. I needed to figure out what he really wanted to know, but my response came out a little more cheeky than I'd intended. Fortunately he didn't hold it against me, probably because I'm pretty obviously a middle-aged woman pushing toward elder, and was there to do business, not get in a fight by being a smartass.
Once we actually got in and at our booth, I had to get everything out of the van as rapidly as possible, while simultaneously not blocking the aisle for other vendors and not covering the floor before the puzzle mats were put down. That meant we ended up with a bunch of stuff on the tables, which we subsequently had to get moved so we could get table covers on and structures built.
As soon as the van was unloaded, I had to take it up to the rooftop parking lot as quickly as possible. However, getting turned around and pointed back out proved a little trickier than I'd anticipated, but the other merchants were really great about getting their stuff out of the aisles and guiding me through multiple hitches on two turns. Still, I was quite glad to be into the open area at the back and to get out without any serious mishaps.
With the van properly parked, I headed back down to the Exhibit Hall to get to work in earnest. We had a lot of stuff to get unpacked, since Youmacon is often one of our best shows of the year. I set to building as many structures as I could so that my husband could start filling them as soon as he finished getting the puzzle mats down on the floor. Because we were able to get unloaded so quickly, I was able to get all our structures built and we even had a good start on filling them before the announcement that we needed to vacate the Exhibit Hall for the night.
We headed back up M-10 to our hotel and got supper. Then I made some more notes on what I wanted to do with the novelette, trying to address the various logic holes I'd noticed as I'd re-read the existing text. Some of them were the result of needing to make it an original-universe story (it had originally been written for a shared-world anthology that had since been canceled, and certain background could be presupposed within that context), but needed to be provided for a stand-alone, but at least some of it just seemed to be a lapse on my part. But the work is almost ten years old, and I had better have grown as a writer in the meantime.
On Friday we got up and had the hotel's complimentary breakfast. Then we headed downtown again to finish setting up. We actually were able to get done on time, and even had signs hung up by the time the doors opened.
Because I'd picked up an annoying head cold, I dug out the emoji mask I'd gotten the previous year at ICON from the AnimeIowa promo party. It might not do a whole lot to protect me from catching opportunistic bacterial infections while the cold had my immune system occupied, but at least it would help keep my germs to myself.
Traffic was uneven. We had some ultra-busy periods when we could barely keep up with the flow of customers, but we also had some periods when we were so slow that I went on my phone and cleaned out more of my inbox.
After the Exhibit Hall closed for the night, we headed back up to the hotel and had supper. I did some more writing and some more work online before turning in.
On Saturday we had the hotel's complimentary breakfast, then headed back downtown for the big sales day. I got out one last box of merchandise that had been missed in our haste to get everything set up on Friday. By the time I was finished with it, the ViP's were trickling in, so I didn't get to do any looking around. I did locate the JAFAX table and find out when they'd be opening applications, and it certainly sounded like the people crewing the table were enthusiastic about having us back, although I don't know if any of them have any authority to select vendors.
Sales were slow most of the morning, but by lunchtime they really began to pick up. However, sales remained small, and we were selling a lot of little things -- one emoji mask, one little squishy, three Japanese bells -- and not that much in the way of t-shirts or other high dollar-value items. We did see some extra interest in the emoji masks which may have been sparked by my wearing my AnimeIowa emoji mask with Buu-chan's snout on it, but that's hard to tell. By the time we closed for the evening, we had a decent amount of money, but not exactly a spectacular one.
We went back to the hotel and had supper. Then I did some more work on my novelette while my husband caught up on his games.
On Sunday we had the hotel's complimentary breakfast, then headed back downtown for the final day of sales. We got our tables uncovered and ready for sales, and then I went around taking at least a little look at the other vendors' wares. However, I didn't get enough time to go clear through the Exhibit Hall and see everyone like I've done in some past years.
Then we settled in to sell as much as we could before we had to pack and get out of there. At first things were so slow that I was wondering how we'd come out. However, just about the time I was needing to start getting packing, we got a bunch of customers. So I had to split my time between packing and selling, and try not to leave customers thinking they shouldn't interrupt me.
We also had a surprise customer make a sizable purchase. One of the janitors had come by to pick up our wastebasket earlier, and had been quite sad to hear that no, there would not be another Michigan Comic Con in 2020, due to the very poor performance of another con by that promoter. Now that she was off the clock, she wanted to buy some of our Chinese knotwork hangings, which was a surprise purchase I would've never expected.
This time both of our helpers showed up, and we were able to get packed and ready to go in good time. They even lifted stuff into the van for us, and I just had to move everything into position to have a stable load for the trip home. We'd emptied a number of boxes, and I was wondering if we'd made a serious mistake when I decided not to buy additional merchandise for our November conventions after the disappointing performance of our October conventions. We ended up loaded and out of the TCF Center well in advance of the 8PM hard deadline imposed by the union.
We got back to the hotel fairly early. After supper I had plenty of time to go through the ledger so I could send an accounting to our consignor and turn in our sales tax money to the state of Michigan. Then I even got to do a little fiction writing before turning in for the night.
On Monday we had the hotel's complimentary breakfast. When I went on my computer to check my e-mail, I discovered that the machine wasn't charging, and the cord beside the power brick was hot. I quick disconnected everything and packed up my computer. Then we got all our personal belongings packed up and hauled back out to the van. At least the weather was much more agreeable than it had been when we carried stuff in, but I had some trouble with the bell cart. The steering wheels kept wanting to get catty-wumpus of each other, making it difficult to move without a lot of swinging back and forth to straighten them up. Once I thought I was going to tip the cart over and dump everything.
As a result, we were a little later getting on the road, but good traffic conditions allowed me to make up for lost time. We stopped in Toledo and I made the deposit, as well as making a visit to Sam's Club for gas and some supplies for the following week's convention in Grand Rapids.
We got home in time to pull in some critical items before going over to the free community meal for supper. When we got back, I carried in the rest of our personal belongings and started the process of getting ready for our next event.
Copyright 2019 by Leigh Kimmel
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Last updated November 23, 2019.