What's happening with Neko Nation? - October 2014

So after the last post and all the questions I'm being asked and some of the rumours I've heard, I think it's good for me to put out some official information on the future of Neko Nation.  I'll be honest that it's a lot of intentions at this stage rather than anything reliable at this stage but no solid information or plans are going to be coming out for a while.

So let's have a look at where Neko Nation is currently at, Neko Nation Sydney is coming up, that's going to be an epic an awesome show, really excited for it as Sydney always is but it's going to be a very special one since the next Sydney show isn't going to be for a while since there definitely isn't one in the works currently planned in the near future.

Perth was the last one announced before I decided to go on a "booking hiatus", meaning that all the announced shows are continuing till December 2014 but usually there's always been a booking plan or another show a bit further down the line that hasn't been announced.  Pretty much at the moment, there is no shows coming up, originally there were a number of shows penciled in for up to April 2015 but I decided not to go ahead with any of those due to my personal life which I wrote about in another post.

So the TL:DR of my personal life is I'm incredibly busy with big changes happening in my personal life and when my schedule allows me to fully dedicate myself back to Neko I will start booking new events again.  I'd rather not give a date which I'll end up kicking myself over in the future but it is likely I'll be aiming to announce something early next year, hopefully sooner but things are pretty full on and unpredictable right now for me to rush an announcement sooner.

I've had one or two people ask me if Neko Nation is going to be shutting down in the future and I'm can assure you it won't be closing any time soon.  My schedule is likely to be less stressful in the future and even if it doesn't, I've been trying to slowly step back and do less and less with my role at Neko Nation and despite being the so called "Supreme Neko Overlord", these events are running awesomely thanks to an epic team helping take over in more aspects these days.

I've also been asked that if I finally graduate then why don't you just run Neko Nation as a career?  It would mean you make money doing what you love and we get more events, it's win/win right?  First of all, it isn't really possible to make a career out of it and I'm honestly not motivated to make a career out of it if I could, looking at the biggest anime events in Australia, conventions, you would honestly struggle to find many people who make a living from them, if any.  I'm not motivated by money to run Neko Nation, it doesn't make a terrible amount of money and I waste a lot of time on it.

The reason I say waste a lot of time, is that it's not just the amount of time I spend getting the event running and making it happen but there's a lot of time spent on researching and experimenting all sorts of crazy concepts, live acts, decor, unique ideas and just making event with a different feel and mixing things up, plus pretty much all the money gets re-invested back into shows.  I'd feel that to make it more of a proper business or living I'd need to start being incredibly efficient with focusing only on what's required to make the event work and that honestly doesn't motivate me, besides I work at ANZ where it's much easier and less stressful for me to make money.

So yeah, I may have rambled a bit there on the whole juggling act of just ditching everything for Neko which won't happen.  Despite everything slowing down it's a temporary solution and I aim to have things running back to normal if anything probably bigger and better than ever.  One of the more interesting things to note is that a lot of my personal life is focused on a new career, now that I won't be a poor uni student, I'm hoping to re-invest some of my personal money into the show on top of the money that the shows make.

So with that said, I've got some pretty exciting and interesting intentions and plans, we've got a whole bunch of cool ideas that are slowly being implemented and making it's way into future shows, I'm looking at a pretty awesome international for next year possibly which I'm so excited for and so can't wait to announce more details soon.  The 2015 shows are going to be absolutely epic and on another level.