Today my brain has been absorbed by party planning. A week from Saturday we’ll be hosting a book release party for The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. (4-6 PM ath the Raddisson Hotel 215 W South Temple in the Cottonwood room.) We’ve hosted book release parties before, but they were always at Dragon’s Keep in Provo. This time we decided to attach the party to a Sci Fi convention in Salt Lake. This gives us the chance to potentially catch the interest of foot traffic at the convention. It also nice to let the Salt Lake fans have a Schlock event near them, rather than always forcing them to drive to Provo. If nothing else, doing the book release this way will be an interesting experiment. The switch in venues presents logistical problems for me. I know exactly how to run a party at Dragon’s Keep. Today I’ve been figuring out how things need to run for the upcoming party.
The first thing to plan is the party schedule. Nothing is as boring as a bunch of people standing around in a room making small talk. Granted, Schlock fan small talk is far more interesting than the regular kind, but still. Things need to happen or everyone will get bored. One of the simplest ways to occupy guests at a party is to feed them. We’ve always done this at Dragon’s Keep, we’ll do it for this party as well. With our first book parties, I tried to be fancy about the food. I brought table cloths and serving dishes. We tried to give the food table real class. Subsequent book parties taught us that we got a far more enthusiastic response from boxes of pizza than we did from beautifully displayed little sandwiches and cream puffs. So for this party we’ll be ordering in Pizza. I’m still trying to decide whether to order two large batches or three medium sized ones. Some of that will depend on budgetary calculations. It will also depend upon having a volunteer willing to meet the pizza guy in the lobby. I’ll be too busy running things to leave and wait for food to arrive. The current plan is for pizza to arrive at 4 pm and 5 pm. This leaves a significant gap during which not much happens. We’ll fill those gaps by having prize drawings at 4:30 and 5:30. Or maybe drawings will happen every 15 minutes. Thus is the schedule set.
Set up will require some attention from me. Unfortunately I will not get a chance to really survey the room until the day before the party. I’ve been in the room before at past conventions, but at that point I was not looking at the room with an eye to running an event there. The biggest concern is traffic flow. We need to have a food table, a signing table, and a cashier table. We’ll need to organize these things in a way so that lines will not collide with each other. We want to make it easy for people to get their book signed and go socialize around the food. Fortunately there is a lobby space just outside the room. We’ll probably set up the signing out there and then have the food and prizes inside the room. Pizza will not be the only food. I’ll be making a Sam’s Club run earlier in the day to fill out the table and make sure that there is plenty for people to eat. The set-up hour is when I will haul this food from our room and get it all laid out. I’ll also need to hang the banners and signs so that everyone knows why there is free food. And there will be merchandise to set up as well.
During the actual party I’ll have to shanghai some helpers. Howard will be completely occupied signing books and talking with fans. I could in theory run everything else myself, but that is a recipe for me collapsing in a frazzled heap. Running the party will probably take three people: Someone to be a cashier, someone to do the drawings for door prizes, someone to monitor the food table and guide the pizza delivery persons. Fortunately at an open-house style event such as this, I don’t have to run around introducing everyone to each other. My hostess duties are limited to making sure that things happen on schedule and making sure that everyone feels welcomed.
So now that is all sorted in my brain. Unfortunately my brain is going to continue to pick at the plan and revise it many times in the next week. But I’ve a plot to foil my fretting brain. I will distract it with the arrival of 5000 shiny books and 2000 shiny slipcases. Or is this fretting over the party actually distracting me from fretting over the arrival of books?