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

Goodness but we’ve been remiss in updating when and where we will be showing up. I have published what we have. I’ve only listed the shows we will likely be in. There will be others, but I don’t confirmation on some of the more unusual ones.

I’m sad to say that one of our staple conventions, OryCon, won’t be held this year. But I hope the convention committee comes back from this break refreshed and ready to tackle more lovely fun!

We’ve talked about the changes brought about by the C19 pandemic. We now have a much better view of what the rest of this year will hold for us at TANSTAAFL Press.

First, we have release updates. The sequel to The Faerie of Central Park, by Bruce Graw, The Gremlin of Morningside Heights, is on its way to the printers as I type this. We expect to have print books in hand by end of July. And, if that isn’t sweet enough, the sequel to Gremlin, The Djinn of the Upper East Side is in our hands and is going through edits. We are hoping to have this available before the end of the year.

Thomas Gondolfi has finished Courting Witchcraft, the sequel to Of Demons and Coal. It is in edit and beta reader’s hands at the moment. This should be available circa mid-August.

And now conventions! (and there was much rejoicing) I won’t lie and say everything is back to normal. Because of this, our convention schedule is rather weird. Here it is, in all it’s glory.

GenCon – Indianapolis, IN – 9/16 – 9/21
Lilac City Comic Con – Spokane, WA – 10/2 – 10/3
Grit City Comic Con – Tacoma, WA – 10/9
Spocon – Spokane, WA – 10/29 – 10/31
OryCon – Portland, WA – 11/14 – 11/14 (unconfirmed)

We feel fairly confident we will be in OryCon but less likely the three below. We have also inquired to RustyCon (Bellvue, WA), Gateway (Los Angeles, CA), and Emerald City Comic Con (Seattle, WA).

Hope we see you there!