Sorry it took me so long to follow up on my Shore Leave experience. I was a bit more out of it than usual on this trip, forgetting things like I mentioned in my previous post, and having my usual issue with lack of sleep in new places. My new, lighter laptop was easier to bring along, but I didn’t feel up to getting any writing done. Actually I’ve sort of been in a development phase, setting aside my story in progress to try to break a new one for an open-call anthology. I’d been thinking about doing a fantasy story in my Thayara universe, and on the trip back, I had the thought that I could do an Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe SF story on the same theme, maybe even write and submit them both to the same anthology, if they’d allow it. I spent a lot of the drive home trying to settle on an idea for that — but once I got home, I checked the parameters again and saw it’s fantasy only. So that was a dead-end digression.

Anyway, my last Shore Leave post was on around 5:30 Friday, and the one significant thing I did after that was the Meet the Pros event at 10:00. It’s been a long time since MtP was particularly busy for me in terms of sales, but I did sell two books and got an “I’ll look for it on Kindle” for a third. And of course, the last half-hour before midnight is usually just a chance for the authors to wander around and chat with each other because all the customers have gone away, although this time it did stay active a little longer than usual.

On Saturday morning, I found that my room’s coffee maker was broken, so I went down to try the hotel’s breakfast buffet that I’d learned about from a Facebook post. It turned out to cost $21 in advance for what was little more than the kind of continental breakfast I’d get for free at a motel. In retrospect, I would’ve been better off just getting coffee and a bowl of cereal from the Starbucks in the lobby. Since I got charged so much, I tried to eat as big a breakfast as I could and take a couple of pieces of fruit with me for later. Ideally I should’ve taken more stuff for later, but I didn’t have anything to put it in.

On Saturday afternoon, after an uneventful half-hour signing session at the Aaron’s Books table, I had four panels in five hours. The eSpec Books panel was in the hotel’s big ballroom, which was very disproportionate to the small number of panelists and audience members (and has bizarrely blinding light fixtures so that I had to wear my sunglasses), so we held the panel as a round table, literally — the panelists on one side of the table and the audience on the other. Danielle McPhail talked a lot about the company and how she came to found it and all the things they publish, so I really didn’t get to talk specifically about Aleyara’s Descent — but that’s okay, since it let me save my energies for the rest of the afternoon. After all, I was randomly assigned the moderator role for the audio drama panel that followed, and rather than try to foist it off on someone else, I did my best to rise to the occasion, though there were a couple of moments when I needed Glenn Hauman to backstop me. It was an interesting discussion about the different approaches to audio drama, whether it’s like the Big Finish Doctor Who and other audios that rely entirely on dialogue and sound effects or the GraphicAudio approach which combines that with novelistic narration. My friend David Mack teased the Star Trek: Khan audio drama he’s co-writing with our mutual friend and big-time TV producer Kirsten Beyer, though he had to avoid specifics because they’re embargoed until San Diego Comic-Con in a couple of weeks. I was intrigued to discover that Dave and I both had fathers who were radio announcers. We’ve been friends for a couple of decades now and I didn’t know that about him.

The next panel was about upcoming Star Trek books, which I really didn’t have much to contribute to; I’d applied for the panel at a time when I hoped I’d have something to announce, but it didn’t work out for the current year, at least. After an hour off for a meal break, I finished up with a panel on using history in writing fantasy/SF, which I talked about mainly in terms of letting my history scholarship inform my science fiction about alien contacts and cultures, like my “Aleyara” stories, which are basically historical fiction set in an alien planet’s history. I was the odd one out there, since most of the other panelists do alternate history or historical fantasy. I moderated that panel as well, though, which gave me something to do when I didn’t have much to say about my own work.

After checking out of my room Sunday morning, I just hung around and tried to pass the time until my 1:30 signing session. I’d considered just hanging around the eSpec table in the dealers’ room for a while, but the noise was kind of overwhelming me and I was feeling pretty out of it, so I went outside to walk around where it was relatively quiet. I wandered around to the back of the hotel until a guy drove up in a golf cart and offered to give me a ride to the front entrance, which I was tired enough to accept, though I banged my knee on the seat in front of me when I got out. I’d assumed he was off on some other errand and just decided to be generous, but I later realized that it was his specific job to drive around the lot offering people rides to the lobby or to their cars, which is a pretty nice service for the hotel to provide.

Anyway, I decided to occupy myself by watching a panel, but I was really sleepy and out of it. I felt better after I went to the lobby Starbucks and got a coffee and a slice of pie. I was going to get just regular coffee, but I saw the clerk preparing a caffe mocha for the customer before me and decided I wanted one too, which turned out to be a good choice. It woke me up enough for my final signing, and though I was expecting Sunday afternoon to be as dead as it was last year, this session actually went pretty well. I sold two books from my own stock and a few more from the copies I contributed to Aaron’s Books on consignment. At the end of the day, when I reclaimed my unsold books from the consignment, they bought two each of my Trek books to sell at their store, and wrote me a check for the whole lot.

The drive home was pretty routine, aside from some rainy weather. I made it as far as New Stanton, PA on Sunday afternoon, stopping before the sun got low enough to shine directly in my eyes as I drove west. On Monday, I hoped to wait around until the rain cleared up, but that would’ve taken most of the day, so I had to drive in the rain and hope to avoid the worst of it. Luckily it was mostly mild to moderate, and my plan to wait out the heavier bits at rest areas gave way to just driving through in hopes of getting past the far end of the rain as soon as I could. Once I crossed over into Ohio, I thought about getting off at St. Clairsville, going to the mall that had held the garage that fixed my flat tire on Thursday, and finding a place there to have lunch and sit out the rain. But when I checked the map navigation for getting there, I saw that it was farther back from the exit than I’d recalled, which felt like going the wrong way, so I just kept on driving.

Eventually I stopped for fuel and lunch at an isolated station/convenience store near Thornville, Ohio, which had a built-in fast-food place called Tic Tac Taco. I was tempted to try the tacos, since I haven’t had one in quite a while, but I ended up having a burrito instead, eating at one of the few tables in the corner while I did some reading on my phone. Then I bought a cup of coffee for the road, and I decided to try another mocha from the convenience store’s coffee machines, but this one was so heavy on the chocolate that I couldn’t even taste the coffee.

After that was pretty uneventful, except that when I stopped at the recently expanded rest area some 67 miles north of Cincinnati, I smiled at a wall display talking about the Museum Center at Union Terminal, which appears in the new Superman movie as the Hall of Justice, since it was the original inspiration for the Hall’s design in Super Friends back in the ’70s. A man standing next to me asked if I’d seen the movie yet, and I talked to him instead about the real history of the Terminal and some of my own personal history visiting there and briefly working there as a guide. (It’s going to be weird going to that movie and seeing superheroes doing stuff inside a location I’ve personally been to and know fairly well.)

I got home around 3:30, and decided to take all my bags in with me in one trip, which is easier than before now that I have two rolling suitcases. It worked pretty well, except that I belatedly realized that the tote bag I’d had draped over the handle of its companion suitcase had somehow vanished by the time I got to my apartment. I rushed downstairs and found it sitting just outside the building door, apparently having slipped loose of the handle somehow and getting forgotten. I’m fortunate that nobody took it, although there was nothing in it except some empty plastic containers and food and drink packaging.

I’ve spent the past couple of days recuperating, going to bed early and actually getting fuller nights’ sleep than I’ve had in quite a while. Although somehow my hip decided to act up and start hurting yesterday morning, after being fine through all my exertions on the trip. I also found that I’ve apparently lost the piece of paper that I noted my book sales on, though I had the information on my phone too. I just went down to double-check if it was in the car, but it’s not there and I’ve checked everywhere it could’ve been. My best guess is that I left it behind at the Aaron’s Books table, which was the last place I know I had it.

Oh, one more odd thing: Even though the suction cups on my car’s solar battery tender keep coming loose from the windshield every time I leave it parked unused for a few days, somehow they remained firmly attached through over a thousand miles of highway driving. It’s a Shore Leave miracle!

Speaking of driving, I just worked out my gas mileage for the trip, and the car managed a bit over 31 MPG on the highway, which is within the typical range of its performance. Gas prices were around 3 bucks in Ohio, about 3.25 on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I probably had enough gas on Friday to make it all the way to the hotel, but I decided to fill up before leaving the Turnpike just in case — only to see that the gas station just blocks away from the hotel had the cheapest gas price I’d seen the whole trip. I should’ve held out. But maybe it worked out, since filling up earlier meant I didn’t need to get quite as much gas at the higher price.

The one thing I have left to do is to file the insurance claim for my flat tire, to get reimbursed for part of the tow-truck charge. But the insurance company isn’t making it easy. The main website says you have to fax the receipt — who even has a fax anymore, and how do I fax an electronic receipt? — and I couldn’t get past the recorded menu on the phone to talk to a real person and gave up in frustration. I finally found an e-mail contact form on the site for my local insurance agent, and I’m waiting to hear back about how to submit the claim.

So that’s it for this year’s Shore Leave. I didn’t achieve all I’d hoped, and I spent more than I hoped, and wasted some of what I spent on food by forgetting to bring it. And I can’t say I was entirely satisfied with the hotel. But it was nice to see my friends and colleagues again, and some of my readers as well.