Today is the last day of my contract job running Nebula Con 2026.
Four and a half months ago, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association contacted me to let me know that they wanted to hire me to manage the Nebula Awards Convention held this year in Chicago. I’d applied for it a few weeks earlier, and they chose me to do it!
I was beyond thrilled at the amazing opportunity although it couldn’t have come at a worse time. We were smack in the middle of our move from Sacramento to Folsom, and just two months away from the Sacramento Book Festival, which I was running.
Still, it was an offer I couldn’t turn down.
And although it was very difficult at times, balancing all of these things and my regular workload, it was absolutely the right thing to do.
For almost three years, I’ve been searching for a new path in life – something I was good at, and something I could actually be hired for. My experience as an entrepreneur is wide but somewhat shallow, and most companies are looking for people who have exactly the opposite, a depth of experience in exactly the job they are hiring for.
I’ve had a number of near-misses – jobs that I should have had a good shot at, where I knew the people doing the hiring, where I made a really good impression in the interview, etc., but nothing came through, until this one.
I got the Nebula gig on the strength of my work at the Sacramento Book Festival, and as I mentioned in my column a few weeks ago, apparently I’m now a large event planner! LOL…
I learned a few important things over the last four months.
First off, I’m really good at organizing big events, even when the timeframe is short and there are unexpected limitations in the role.
Second, I really enjoy the process, but even more, I love seeing the finished thing come together at the end, the result of all the hard work that my team and I put in to make it happen.
Third, and this may be most important one, and it stems from the first two: I realized I have value.
I started seeing a therapist when I was first beginning my job hunt, because I realized that watching our old business decline had taken a real toll on my self-esteem. These were websites we’d created back in the late nineties and early 2000’s, which had thrived for almost two decades while giving voice to parts of the LGBTQ+ Business Community. We were very proud of the work we did for them, and the related human rights work for marriage equality.
But after a decade of decline brought about by search engines more interested in profit than the common good, I no longer felt powerful. I no longer felt capable and strong and focused. Instead, I was demoralized, beaten down by what the constant advance of technology and corporate greed had done to our business.
We spent years trying to fight it, coming up with creative new ways to bring in traffic. But in the end, you can’t fight Big Corporate. We shut down our legacy websites, and threw ourselves into what remained.
In the midst of all this, we experienced a ten-year pause in our lives, frozen in place, unable to move forward, unable to go back.
Now, finally, life is moving again. We’re in our new house, I’ve just completed a fantastic contract job that taught me things about myself, and will hopefully set me up for something new in the future. And most importantly: I believe in myself again.
When you are young, life seems full of promise, with everything waiting ahead of you. As you get older, you start to see things a little differently. There are seasons in every life, and while they are not always clearly marked at the time, in retrospect, you can see how things shifted, and when.
This time, though, I’m feeling the shift in real time. The ice is melting, and Marco and I are moving into a new season of our lives. And just like the first thin bites of grass breaking through the snow, I can tell already that it’s going to be something beautiful.
Viva la Spring.