Today is my first day off in what feels like a very long time.

As you may or may not know, I co-organized Stagconf, a one-day conference on storytelling and games, together with my wonderful wife Andy Schmoll and our good friend Harald Eckmueller.

Like the best of adventures, it seemed like a good idea at the time, turned out to require much more work and energy than we naively expected, involved a lot of drama and excitement, and had a happy ending.

It took place last Tuesday, September 27th. So far, the positive feedback has been very, very positive, and the negative feedback was along the lines of "I didn't get a chance to eat one of the donuts and they looked yummy".

I didn't write much about it here. Apart from the fact that I don't blog much anymore in general, the main reason was fear. Fear of announcing something that might turn out to fail. Fear that my terror of this whole thing becoming a spectacular and costly failure would be obvious, and would jinx things. Conquering this fear was a wonderful experience, one that I'm very glad to have had. Despite it being terrifying.

At some point it became clear to me that we were effectively running a little startup on the side, next to our day jobs. A day job which in my case involved working at another startup. If you've been in a startup, you know it's an emotional roller coaster. Being on two emotional roller coasters at the same time was stressful to say the least, especially in late July and August when we had just started selling tickets and had not closed any sponsorship deals.

This stress also lead to, ironically, me not wanting to deal with games or storytelling in games or any other side projects. And in the final weeks, it lead to my wife and me not wanting to deal with cooking, cleaning or having a social life.

But now the conference is over. The last speaker is flying back to the US. I still have to organize some feedback surveys, and we've started thinking about next year's conference. But today, I can sleep in, catch up on my reading, think of new adventures, and enjoy the beautiful weather.