How to Plan an Event When You Hate Planning Events
Or the memorial detritus of seven Halloween parties
“The Way It’s Supposed to Be” comes out in e-book and paperback July 10th. Pre-order your e-book now for just $2.99. It’s fiction, but still, it’s a lot like this newsletter. Pre-orders help me out with search visibility. Thanks!
The last time I planned a successful event, it was called “Half-Price Halloween Party.”
Kelly, my best friend/roommate/partner in free-associative mayhem, and I came up with this clever November 1st shindig to serve several purposes:
We loved getting dressed up for Halloween.
We liked staying home and bringing the party to us.
We were broke and could save on Halloween decor by purchasing it the day after Halloween.
We wouldn’t have to compete with all the other October 31st parties for guests.
We were in our very early 20s, barely out of teenhood and planning a party for a bunch of our peers was simple: throw a few decorations on the walls of our apartment, gather favorite CDs by the living room stereo and make a shit-load of trashcan punch. At that age, our standards for “party” were pretty basic; if people showed up and got drunk, it was a success.
I haven’t planned many events since then because even those low-stakes parties stressed me out a little. What if no one came? What if it was lame? I always got a little wound up the day of, rushing around cleaning floors and countertops that were just going to get trashed as soon as the sun went down and the first guests arrived.
My first husband, Javier, and I had a handful of Halloween parties after we bought a house and had plenty of space. There was the year we’d pulled up the carpet in anticipation of laying tile. We drew chalk body outlines on the concrete floors and didn’t worry about knocked-over red wine. By the second half of our 20s, we had graduated from trashcan punch and cheap kegs of beer to wine and more expensive kegs of beer.
There was the year someone over-flushed in the guest bathroom, and I found Jason (years before he and I were anything but friends) crouched on the closed lid, surrounded by two inches of water, shouting “I got it under control! As your insurance agent, I got this!” There was also the year our eccentric next-door neighbor had sex with his girlfriend on the hood of my car. Come to think of it, that was all the same year, minutes apart.
There was the year the cops showed up for a noise complaint, and then there was the year hardly anyone came, and it was in fact sort of lame. By that time, I was kinda over having Halloween parties and was just being dragged through it by Javier. So yeah, I guess I HAVE planned events between 1997 and now but 90 percent of them were Halloween parties, and I never did shake the nervous feeling I got beforehand.
That low-grade anxiety persevered throughout my kids’ early years when I wrung my hands about baby shower attendance and five-year-old birthday party activities. I was relieved when we got to a stage where we could take the kids somewhere special for their birthdays with a friend or two and dispense with the party at the house with the whole class, planned games and stress about what to do if the weather was shitty and we had to keep the whole party inside.
Some people are GREAT at planning events.
Some people LOVE it. My former boss was one of those people. She thought of everything and was committed to getting the details of each event just right. She would walk through the venue imagining the experience of the guests, making sure it was pleasant, enticing and seamless. She once asked me to tell a hotel we needed Diet Coke for an upper-level executive even though they only served Pepsi products. I was all Marie Antoinette, “Let him drink Diet Pepsi.” I want things simple and straightforward, which can be good but can also keep me from including some thoughtful, fun stuff. She and I were good complements when planning together — her attending to necessary and considerate details, me keeping it from getting too complicated.
Now, I’m planning a book launch party for The Way It’s Supposed to Be.
Theoretically. My friends said the other day, while we were lounging in their pool, “You should totally have a book launch party!” The only planning I’ve done thus far is responding that yes, I should and then googling “how to plan a book launch party.” You are currently complicit in my procrastination because I am writing about planning instead of actually doing the planning.
This whole publishing a book and marketing thing has shoved me beyond where I feel comfy, so I guess I’m just going to set up a tent and long-term camp out here beyond my comfort zone. Planning events and soliciting stores to carry my book, are just the next circle beyond the zone. If I’m not careful, I may actually settle in out here in book marketing land, maybe buy a vacation home. Of course, that’ll take a lot more book sales.
People who love planning events fascinate me.
They’re like some alien species, with all of their confident ideas they actually carry out. I mean, there are people who are event planners for a living. There are people who like gathering decorations and assembling party favors. There are people who make playlists without worrying everyone will hate their music choices. There are people who LIKE selecting hors d’oeuvres. The only part of event planning I can do semi-confidently is pick out the alcohol. (Based on my stories here, I have a lot of experience with that.) But seriously, are you one of these event-planning people? What is that even like? Seriously.
Update: I wrote this yesterday morning, and since then, I have semi-secured a date and venue for the book launch party. If you’re like me and tend to procrastinate event planning long enough to be able to rationalize not having the event at all, I recommend sort of backing yourself into a corner. Now that I have a date and I’ve spoken with the venue owner, I have forced myself to actually plan it.
Tentative date for Book Launch party: July 20. Details coming soon. If you’re in the Austin area, stop by!