They say that Fate is a cruel taskmistress. I believe it to be so. As if this trip already hadn’t had enough surprises, the road home gave me one more twist.

I drive an eco diesel pickup—the Maroon Marauder (as I call her). The newer diesels have an ingenious method for reducing emissions. They spray uric acid (also known as Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF)) into the exhaust. The reaction reduces those nasty things that made diesels so smelly and horrible in the past. Well, I’m minding my own business, looking forward to being home. I’m in the wilds of Montana when I get a message from my truck: “DEF system failure. See Dealer.”

I’m thinking, OK. I’ll be back in a day and a half. I have two repairs on my truck that need to be performed when I get home anyway. I’ll just add this to my list when I go into the dealer.

I’m all fine and good until thirty minutes later the message changes to: “DEF system failure. Vehicle will not restart after 200 miles.” This began a countdown of mileage. Oh, fudge.

Luckily (he says with a bit of sarcasm), Bozeman, MT was just thirty miles away. I pulled into the dealership in town with one hundred sixty-ish miles left on my countdown. I go inside to find out that they can’t even put my truck up on a lift for three days. Calling about, I find no relief for that three-day period.

Now a little issue that I’ve failed to put out there… My son’s wedding was in about eleven days, so I have a deadline.

I looked into several options: renting an RV spot for a week, including renting an alternative tow vehicle (none available), renting a hotel room (ludicrous cost as it is the height of the season).

Eventually, the only feasible option that presents itself is an RV spot about thirty miles away. I will rent it for the week and see how it goes. So off I go to park my tentative home for the week. Along the way, the countdown and message about the failure went away.

“What do I do now?” I thought. “Is it still counting or did it just go silent?”

I end up going and talking to the dealer again and the answer is inconclusive… Only that it failed at some point and isn’t failed now. Can I succeed in going the rest of the eight hundred miles? No one is willing to commit. I do ask what it means by saying it wouldn’t restart. What if I keep going and never turn it off? Apparently, after the two hundred miles it would throttle my speed to five miles an hour if I dropped below 15mph. After fifty miles it would shut down the engine. I wallowed in angst for some time before making the decision to press on.

It appears I made the right choice. I never got the message again. I was able to travel without interference the rest of the way home.

Thus ends one of the more eventful Great Road Trips.

This has to be one of the more eventful segments of my entire life. The day I am scheduled to leave, I have an eye issue. I have a floater in my left eye the size of… well, make a stop sign of your hand and hold it at arm’s length. The entire size of your hand is a spiderweb across the focus spot of my eye. Troubling!

A few calls to my eye doctor back home sent me to someone local to check it out. $150 and the flash blindness that goes with eye dilation later, it isn’t serious but rather something that comes with age. It will go away over time.

Next, I decided to stop and visit my friend, Bruce Graw, in Kettering, OH and his family a bit more as it is on the way. While I’m sleeping in my trailer on the edge of his lawn, the driver of a car on a perpendicular street has a medical emergency. At ludicrous speed, he rams a large pickup (spins it around 110 degrees, totaling it), The runaway car flips over in mid-air and hits an SUV (and shoves it out of the way), lands on its roof, and slides to a stop 14” from my trailer. His headlight assembly flies out of his car and slams against the side of my trailer putting a fist-sized dent in the side. Had either pickup or SUV not been there, the runaway car would have torn my trailer in half. NOTE: the driver was taken to the hospital with minor injuries.

OK, that’s two bad things, and according to sayings they come in threes. On the way to Indianapolis from the Dayton area, I get a flat in a tire I’d planned on replacing when I get home. On the surface of things, this wouldn’t seem too bad, BUT, I have to unhook the trailer and swap the tire on the truck. Pickups are NOT built for serviceability. I’m a seasoned mechanic and it took me 90 minutes to get the tire off and the spare put on. $500 and two and a half hours after that, I had new tires on the back of my truck. The money didn’t bother me, but the time did as it meant I missed my arrival at the Indy RV park. But I was able to get a late arrival and all was good.

GENCON 2023:

OK, There were many goods and bads to GC this year. I’ll start with the bad and get those out of the way.

1. They moved the marshaling yard with effectively no notice. The marshaling yard is where vendors go to get in a queue to be able to drive in and offload their stuff. We had to drive around to find it. Oh, and they haven’t solved any problems of the past yet. 1hr sitting around waiting for them to let us in. 30 minutes to load in, get our badges, and set up.
2. There is a street between the convention center and Colt’s stadium. Bruce and I have always used this as a place to drop off each day (short walk to the back door), and to load out (and avoid the dreaded Marshaling Yard on the return). The city had blocked this off during the convention. (Grrrr) Longer walks in and out as well as marshalling yard OUT took 2+ hours just to get to the same location we normally pack out!
3. I vended next to a young lady who poached people I was talking to. This is extremely rude. It didn’t happen to just me. Several other vendors around her said the same thing. And on the final day she used a pitch that I think is just wrong (and other vendors) about “helping me by buying books so I don’t have to carry them to my car” or something like that.
4. I didn’t reach my goal of having record sales (but did respectably). I suspect I might have reached record sales if it weren’t for #3 above.
5. Really getting homesick… this trip seems interminable.  

Now the good things that happened.

1. I had a single record sale of 17 books. It started out normal enough. He asked about one book. I told him and he said “I’ll take that one.” Everytime he asked me about a book or a series the answer was the same. We got up to 9 books and he started to check out. I’d already run the sale when he said… “Wait, you didn’t tell me about this one.” Eight more books joined the pile. This is the single largest sale I’ve had, ever!
2. Great to see all of my fans! In fact, Michael (last name withheld because I don’t have permission) 3D printed me a parabola slinky. It’s a good deal of fun. Wonder how the cats will react to it back home. Special shout out to Beth, a fan who got married since our last meeting.
3. While we didn’t reach our record sales, we did quite nicely.
4. Got to mingle with all of my author friends.

Ok, I’m heading the farthest east I’ve traveled with TANSTAAFL Press. But, along the way, I’m stopping at Bruce Graw’s house for a visit and to pick up some things I had shipped there (I was short of some books and business cards).

I did dinner with his sister, we went and saw a couple of movies (Indiana Jones, and Spiderman), and I attended D&D with him.

I also managed some prosaic things like laundry, a minor trailer repair, and catching up on sleep! Nice visit but I had to make it march to get to Confluence in Pittsburg. Besides, Bruce comes to GenCon with me and helps me man the booth there. We will chat more there.

Welcome to Confluence in Pittsburg! This lovely convention had many surprises in store for me.

 First, let’s start with accommodations. I was able to boondock in the parking hotel lot, but at a cost. No, not a monetary cost, but a physical one. To be out of the way, the only spots available were not even sort of level. Where I ended up, I had a list of approximately 10 degrees from the driver’s side down to the passenger’s side and a slight head’s down angle, but nothing like the side-to-side problem.

Now, nominally a slight angle isn’t an issue but this was severe enough to cause problems. I had to sleep on my bed diagonally (and not sleep well). It also didn’t allow for cooking. And my spare hours really only had one position that was even halfway comfortable… leaning up against the wall in my dinette area. That doesn’t even talk about doing bathroom issues and other things.

Not the most comfortable of my stays on this trip.

The next surprise was the convention itself. I’m usually a good judge of how large a show is just from the website and talking with the convention committee. I had this down as a 1-2K attendee show. <BUZZ> Thanks for playing. More on this later. 

Day one was very disappointing with light traffic, minimal interactions by the people, and even fewer sales. Day two was turning better but still light. I wondered where all the people were. Until I heard a couple of the convention committee chatting near my booth that the total gate count was about 280 souls. Ack!

I’ll be honest, if I’d known that there were so few people, I may not have attended. And I would have missed out on what turned into a pretty decent show all, in all.

While for us, sales aren’t everything, they are a metric of how well the business is doing overall. There is a general tenant that for any show, a vendor should get 3-5x the cost of the show in sales to make it worthwhile. This show hit 6x even though we were only 2/3rds the nominal target sales we have for any show. So from a purely business perspective, the show turned out well.

From an engagement perspective, I had some problems. My normal patter (or flirting for those who remember my class Flirting for Fun and Profit) just wasn’t working as well as most every other convention. My rough guess is that it is an East Coast vs West Coast thing. I’m not at all saying that the EC folks were standoffish, only that I didn’t know the keys to properly engage. It did get better as the weekend went on, but I still felt there was a strain there that I don’t feel elsewhere. Maybe next time, I’ll get it right.

Well, I stopped along the way to visit with some relatives… ex relatives? My niece and sister-in-law from when I was married to my first wife. I’m still on good terms with them and dropped by for a nice lunch. Very friendly and we had fun catching up.

Afterward, Google Maps has taken me off of I-90 (same length of time but there are tolls) and put me on Iowa’s Highway 20. I’m not sure I’m liking a highway that has stop signs and stoplights. Sigh. But I’m still making good time.

I seem to be leapfrogging a major storm cell. It washes over me when I’m asleep with masses of thunder, lightning, and drenching downpours. Then I seem to race through it during the day. It keeps things cool and exciting, all at the same time.

Arrived at the site of the convention and was invited by the hotel staff to stay in the parking lot in my RV. This will save me a good deal of traveling back and forth. I can stay at the con and enjoy some of the festivities after the dealer’s room closes.

InConJunction is a nice little SF convention with some great folks (maybe 1500 people) in Indianapolis. There were many different tracks of seminars and panels, six at the same time. One of the tracks was the Writer’s Symposium which had many different topics including a pair of open mic nights for authors, poets, etc. I gave them the first several pages of my novel Of Demons and Coal, “The Easy Way,” a micro story in my short story collection Window of Opportunity, and read my “Programming Loyalty” from the anthology It’s Your Cow by Frog Jones. We also had readings from two different authors who have been nominated for a Hugo – Mary Robinette Kowal and Marie Vibbert. Sales were OK. Nothing to write home about but I’d like to do this show again. Next year’s show is themed Steampunk! If I can fit it in, I’ll be there.

BTW, no longer cool! Approaching 100F during the days.

Previous leg of Roadtrip – Leg 2
Next leg of the Roadtrip – Leg 4

Castle Rock, WA to Rapid City, SD

Three days of driving. If you’ve ever taking a long road trip there wasn’t anything you haven’t seen. Uneventful. The only unusual thing is that I prepared for hot summer weather and it rarely broached 70 degrees F. Mostly it stayed in the 50s and overcast. Occasionally, I was rewarded with some light rain.

Made it to a friend’s house in Spearfish, SD, about 40 minutes from my destination. Here I stopped and played LOTS of games with him and his wife.

Friday was day 1 of BLACK HILLS CON. Unfortunately for attendance, the storms (yes, plural) that I’d been traveling under finally pushed over the mountains and descended on the Black Hills and poured rain, and hail, and spawned tornadoes all over. I did meet a lot of nice folks including a book vendor that I first met at MisCon.

I did my first seminar for the convention, “Making Characters of Your Characters,” with an interesting snafu, the first of several regarding my seminars here. I arrived about 5 minutes before my appointed time to find a young lady behind the “panelist” table. I remarked that I didn’t know this was going to be a panel and asked who was leading it. She claimed she was despite being massively nervous. Whatever. I’ll go with the flow.

We had about ten audience members (amazing for a con of this size). Without introducing me, this young woman (whose name escapes me but I have a picture!) starts talking about scare acting… that is being a member of a haunted house or the like. I’m trying to figure out what this has to do with characters. A number of the audience is looking at me in confusion as well. To make a long story short, she was scheduled for 5PM and it was only 4PM.

<insert picture>

Soooooooo, we all talked it over and let her continue. I didn’t get to start my seminar until just shy of 5. I got many kudos AND several people from this seminar came to see ALL of my talks. Being out of my booth for two hours was hard.  

Saturday started bright but by the time the convention started, we had another storm cell overhead. Marginally better than Friday, allowing me to cover my booth and cost of books and well into starting to defray the significant expense of driving out here.

Seminar snafu #2. Somehow, I was scheduled to give the same seminar “Believable World Building” both at noon and 1. Apparently, he thought I was going to do some interactive with the audience and would need more than an hour. NOPE. So, I gave my seminar. Somehow, the Q&A got partially hijacked about my favorite version of D&D and what RPG systems I’ve played. We got back on track but it was a weird diatribe. The seminar ended 10 minutes to 1, just in time for several people who wanted the seminar but weren’t available at noon. Not wanting to disappoint, I gave it again. Out of my booth again for two hrs.

Sunday, like many cons, was all but dead for us dealers. I had my last seminar, the biggest snafu of them all at noon. The problem was that I wasn’t supposed to give another seminar. When I’d talked to the folks about seminars they had me fill out a form. It was pretty typical. Name of seminars, brief descriptions, name of presenter, a brief description of the presenter, how much time for each, special needs.

Somehow, the brief description of myself got turned into a seminar: “10+ book published novelist and graduate of SDSM&T.” SDSM&T is the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, my alma mater. Five people attended—two from my other seminars.  And I talked about all manner of things from how I got into the business of being an author/publisher, to the basic outline of steps to publish, to colleges, to … We were all over the place.

Before we wrapped up, I got an evil surprise. The con people delivered SD state tax forms. That I had to pay tax, I didn’t have a problem with. I charge it when I take a CC payment and I eat it when I take cash. Like most shows, I google the tax rate for the city I’m doing. I was told, on the .gov site, that the tax rate was 4.5%. This form said that was only the state tax and I had to pay an additional 1.5% for tourism tax (really?), and a 2% city tax. I had to pay 3.5% in addition to what I’d ferreted out. Ack!

Loud out was simple, but most of the vendors started tearing down an hour before the room closed. At most conventions I go to, that is a MASSIVE no-no. It will get you blacklisted. Oh, well.

Next leg of the Roadtrip – Leg 2