It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks here at Mechanoid Press Merchantile. First off, some good news. I have been accepted as a guest at Multiverse, October 15-17 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia (actually Sandy Springs). I am super excited, as this will be another first-time con for me.
Last weekend was ConCarolinas, another first. But what should have been a fun, relatively easy trip was marred with difficulty. In our infinity wisdom we decided it would be a great idea to haul our 2006 travel trailer up to Charlotte and stay in an RV park just 35 minutes away. Think of the money we’ll save!
Life said, “Not so fast.” Just minutes after we pulled into the campground and were headed toward our site, we felt a bump coming from the trailer. My wife and I both thought it was a speed bump, even though our truck never went over such a bump. Then we glance in the right side mirror just in time to see a tire bouncing away. The bump we felt was the right rear trailer tire running over the shattered brake assembly of the right front tire we saw rolling away. The entire wheel had sheered off the axel.
We stopped, I grabbed the tire and wheel and threw it onto the back of the truck, and we headed to the campsite, where we discovered that A) their septic access was too far away from the trailer’s hook-up and B) we had no power. In June. In Charlotte humidity. Fortunately, there was a bathhouse nearby, but there was nothing to be done about the wheel issue but sit out in the heat calling our insurance, who we paid $281 so they could find someone who could haul the trailer to an RV repair facility. No such luck. To do so requires what I am given to understand is called in the trade a “low boy”, one of those large, heavy duty trailers they use to haul bulldozers and other heavy equipment. No one had one available at the time, and anyone who did were too far away to want to come get it. After all of Friday afternoon in the heat we declared going to the con that day a lost cause. Fortunately, the trailer’s power kicked in about 10pm that night, so we had air conditioning, and got showers in the bathhouse. “Tomorrow is another day,” I declared, shaking my fist at an uncaring sky, and went to bed.
I wasn’t about to spend another day making calls and getting nowhere, so we decided to pull the trailer up to the campground’s office (which was as far as we dared to pull her). We had already explained what was going on, and they were sympathetic. They let us park it there out of the way and cancel the remainder of our stay, then we went to the hotel, where I chatted with my friend Dacre Stoker–the great grand-nephew of Dracula author Bram Stoker–briefly outside.
After a chat with the friendly front desk clerk, I discovered that while there were still rooms available, there were none available at the discounted convention rate. So, even though I was there because of the con, I could not get the con rate. Don’t you just love that about hotels? I know I do.
But, as I said, the clerk was really nice, and he suggested I try to book through a discount travel site. I went back out to the truck, found a travel site link in the Google Maps directions for the hotel, and my wife worked her magic.
The rest of the con went pretty well. I only sold three books, but the author’s alley was in a prime spot, and I had a great time talking with my fellow Falstaff Books authors, including the HMFIC of Falstaff himself, publisher and author John Hartness. In the panel we were on together he broke the record for the most uses of the word ‘cloaca’ on a panel. Fun times.
While I was downstairs getting my half table set up, my wife was upstairs in our wonderfully air-conditioned room, doing what she does best: getting things done. I don’t know what sorcery she used, but she found someone who could come out and actually repair the axel, something we were told by more than one person could not be done onsite. The problem: they charged us a thousand bucks. The other problem: we knew it didn’t actually cost that much, and our guy back home could fix it for a third of that. But that’s what happens when you’re stuck out of state and at people’s mercy and good (or bad) humor. We agreed, because what else were we going to do, and he said he’d meet us Sunday at the trailer at 1:30pm, after church.
I spent Sunday morning at my table, but the crowds had already thinned out. I had one panel and then we bailed, going for brunch before heading back to the trailer. Were we waited. And waited. And waited. I texted the guy. He said he did the family thing on Sundays and would be there later. Later came, and still no guy. We hung out in the large log cabin building that was the campground’s office. Still no guy. I played four games of chess with my daughter via a game table in the lobby. Still no guy.
In the meantime, my wife found a Post-It note on the trailer from someone who wanted to buy the trailer. I call him up. He said he’d be there at 5:30.
Finally, around 5 o’clock, two guys in a work truck show up and say they have the axel. Neither one of them is the guy we actually spoke with, whose last reply to my text stated that he doesn’t normally work on Sundays. While I’m chewing on the irony of a guy who went from “I’ll see you at 1:30” to “I don’t work on Sundays” in the space of 24 hours, it starts to rain really hard for about ten minutes. Once it stopped, these guys got to work, reinstalling the axel they half-ass welded back together for a thousand bucks.
But while that’s going on, the guy who wanted to buy the trailer shows up, and I give him a tour. Now this thing is pretty rough around the edges, and was when we bought it off a relative of mine. Water damage, spongy floor in the bedroom, the works. We knew we were going to take a loss no matter what, but at this point we were done, and didn’t care. I did not want to haul it home, and we spent Friday afternoon unloading everything we had stored in it and stuffed it into the back of our truck until it looked like the Beverly Hillbillies on vacation.
So long story short, he paid us in cash and I paid the guys from that, giving us a little left over, but not much. We drove home, stopping in Easley, South Carolina to eat a late dinner, and finally got home around 11:30 pm.
We learned a lot of lessons on this trip, not the least of which is never camp when going to a con.
Oh, and this big wet dump of a ride came hot on the heels of a forged check a “client” sent me! Fun times. Fortunately I never sent them any money, and I have made a police report.
As for what else is going on, I’ve started work on a new project, a space opera adventure with a youngish protagnist in the vein of a Heinlein juvie. It’s been a lot of fun to write. It will probably end up as a novella but I’m hoping for short novel length. I’m still waiting on cover art for another novella that I’m going to serialize here before publishing, and I might turn a couple of ebook only projects into print editions. Stay tuned for that.
I’m also going to do a couple of virtual panels. One is on income streams for authors, and is for Hoover, Alabama’s Sci-Fi Fantasy Fest, which is going virtual this year due to you know what. Joining me for that one are authors Bobby Nash, Russell Nohelty, and Teel James Glenn.
And I’ve been invited to participate in a panel for Con-Tinual on writing pulp for modern audiences. That one is being recorded June 22nd. I’ll post links to all of these once they exist. Until then…
Keep Watching the Skies!
James