Shore Leave followup post

Okay, I’m back home after Shore Leave. The car worked fine both ways, with no problems. There were moments when I heard a repetitive noise from the tires that made me worry after my blowout last year, but when I stopped at a gas station to check, the tires were fine. It must’ve just been something in the texture of the road making that sound and making me paranoid.

I had a nice uneventful trip, avoiding nearly all the rain that had been predicted. Baked a frozen pizza the night before, so I had leftover pizza for lunch and dinner on the road. (Cold pizza is surprisingly good.) Spent the night at my cousin’s place as usual, left for the hotel after lunch on Friday. My weather app showed clear skies for another hour or two… but once I got onto the road, I saw I was heading straight toward a scary-looking cloudbank with multiple lightning strikes appearing directly ahead of me within a couple of minutes. The app must simply have been missing data for that hour. I was soon in the middle of a torrent.

Luckily I spotted a donut place just before the highway and had a muffin and iced tea while I waited out the worst of the storm. Still, it was a fairly rainy drive to the hotel, and my GPS kept rerouting me due to traffic slowdowns. I ended up taking some quiet, one-lane back roads that eventually connected to the big road past the hotel.

Then I discovered I arrived too early and my room wasn’t ready, so I just sat around on a bench outside and thought about my writing plans. I was reluctant to spend too much time in the hotel’s public areas, since they no longer require proof of COVID-free status, and nobody told me. I was one of the few people still masked, even including fellow writers who’ve been pretty conscientious about it in the past. Maybe we’re at the point where the risk is low enough for that, but I still wasn’t ready to risk it, given that my last booster is 6 months old and, well, I was a germophobe to begin with.

Once I did get to go to my room, I learned how foolish I’d been not to replace my suitcase after the zipper broke last year. I thought I could get by with multiple little bags — even had the clever idea to use one of my bike panniers, which have shoulder straps — but when you’re exhausted and your hotel room is two stories up and several long corridors away from your car, suitcase wheels are extremely worth having.

At this point, I barely had time to shower and change and was half an hour late to my first panel, talking about Star Trek Discovery. I didn’t really contribute much, and mainly just listened to my friend Kirsten Beyer, whom I haven’t seen since she became a writing staffer on Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds, as she talked about the show. I did field a question from an audience member asking if I felt a “burden” to maintain the continuity of the Trek timeline in my novels, and I said, no, there’s no burden. This is all make-believe for entertainment, not a real history that needs to be chronicled and gotten right. Using continuity in my fiction isn’t a matter of obligation, just a creative choice in service to telling stories. And changing continuity can also serve stories in some cases, like when I replaced “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide” with Arachne’s Crime, the updated and reworked version of the same event in the continuity of my Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe.

This was immediately followed by a panel discussing why there have been so few new Star Trek novels in the past year or two, in which other panelists like Dayton Ward and David Mack had far more to offer than I did; I was mainly there in hopes of getting an answer to the question. Apparently it came down to a perfect storm of factors including the COVID disruptions in publishing supply chains and the legal problems with the abortive attempt to sell Simon & Schuster, which postponed the license renewal process until it was sorted out. It seems things are expected to begin moving again by 2024, I think, but there’s nothing more definite yet.

Because of my fatigue and COVID concerns, I just holed up in my room until the Meet the Pros signing event. It was pretty slow in terms of selling books, as it usually is in recent years. But I did sell four books, which isn’t bad. My credit card scanner seems to be on the fritz, but the app lets you pay by showing one of those QR code thingies you can scan with your phone. The next day, I did my requisite hour at the book dealers’ table — getting to sit outside the “Author Chimney,” the infamous narrow space between brick columns where we’re usually boxed in. I sold another four books there, all cash sales this time, though one person had to go to the ATM and come back.

The weird thing is, I thought I’d only brought two copies each of the Arachne novels and sold one of each, yet when I got home I had two copies of each. I was afraid maybe I’d somehow forgotten to give the customer his books, but I remember signing them for him, I don’t have the Trek book he also bought, none of the copies I had were signed, and my total inventory for each Arachne novel is one less than it was. So I guess I actually brought three copies of each and got confused.

Anyway, during downtime in my room, I found out the hotel TV lets you stream YouTube, so I was able to watch the premiere of Ultraman Blazar, the newest season of the franchise and something of a reboot, which is quite impressive so far, enough that I watched it twice. (Tsuburaya simulcasts new episodes of Ultraman live on YouTube with English subtitles, and even with a simultaneously English dub for this series, which YouTube defaulted to. It took a while to figure out how to adjust the language settings with a remote control.) The hotel also offered its patrons free (The Streamer Formerly Known as HBO) Max, so I was able to watch the 2-part premiere of My Adventures with Superman as well. That’s also a very impressive start, and it was cool to see both shows on a big screen. (I rewatched that one too, but just now at home, so they’d be logged as watched on my own Max account.)

Otherwise I didn’t do much but hang around and chat with other writers. I did sit in on a workshop panel that Kirsten Beyer ran with Dave Mack, Dayton Ward, and my fellow Star Trek Adventures writers Derek Tyler Attico and Kelly Fitzpatrick, where they ran a mock writers’ room session breaking (i.e. brainstorming and outlining) a nonexistent Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode to illustrate how the story break process works — complete with Michael Jan Friedman & Bob Greenberger getting into character as the network suits they pitched the story to after they broke it. Kirsten made a pretty natural showrunner, and I’m sure she’ll be doing it for real in time. She said they weren’t bothering to come up with a good episode, since they didn’t want the mock episode to be anything like a real one, but they actually came up with some some cool character beats on top of a deliberately cliche plot.

Then there was the annual writers’ barbecue dinner. We used to go over to Andy Nelson’s BBQ a couple of miles from the hotel, but for the past three cons, Keith R.A. DeCandido and Wrenn Simms have organized a catered Andy Nelson’s dinner in the hotel’s meeting lounge. Which is convenient and all, but it got really noisy. Still, I had some nice chats and a nice meal, and I got to make a second pulled-turkey sandwich to keep in my room fridge and have for lunch on Sunday.

I’d been thinking of leaving early on Sunday in hopes of getting home in one day, but there was heavy rain forecast along my route, so I decided to wait until it passed. When the time came to check out of my room, I had the belated good idea to call for a luggage cart so I could take all my little bags out to the car in one go (though I kept my laptop with me in my backpack rather than leave it in the hot trunk). Afterward, I mostly just hung out with Danielle & Mike McPhail at the eSpec Books table, where we discussed my progress on Arachne’s Legacy and the prospects of a second collection of my published stories (including some Patreon exclusives).

The rain didn’t let up until after 4 PM, so I went back to the grocery store to get another sandwich and some bottled iced tea for the road, then ate half of the sandwich (well, wrap) in the parking lot before setting out. I knew I’d have to stop at a motel for the night, so I decided to head up for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where there would probably be more motels than on the route Google Maps usually sends me on. To achieve this, I had to tell the Maps app that I wanted to go to Pittsburgh. So I made it to the Turnpike just before more rain started to come in, and stopped at the first convenient motel. I chose one I think I’ve stayed at before (or at least one of a chain I remembered finding decent), which meant not settling for the cheapest option. And I didn’t manage to find any Pennsylvania motel coupons at the rest stops, so I had to pay full price. Which means I spent more on this trip than I earned. Still, at least I came close to breaking even, not counting the pricey car repairs.

But staying in for the night was worth it, since I had a manageable drive home and wasn’t too worn out when I arrived; indeed, I was even kind of chipper from all the iced tea and coffee drinks I had along the way. So it all worked out okay.

At least, during the trip. This morning, I decided to go get gas and run an errand, and the car wouldn’t start. I couldn’t get my jumpstarter battery pack to work right at first, but I finally did, and I figured I just needed to drive around for a while to recharge it, like before. My errand was about 20 minutes away, which seemed enough, but when I stopped at the gas station, the battery was still empty, and apparently the jumper pack didn’t have enough juice and wouldn’t work, so I needed to ask another customer to give me a jump start. Which meant I had to cancel my errand and drive back home, after calling the garage and being told they couldn’t see me until tomorrow. I drove a full half-hour this time, taking a roundabout route, and still there was barely enough charge left to lock the doors. It does seem like the battery finally died, but it’s wild that it held out until just after I got home.

And that’s what I did on my summer vacation. Now I just have to hope I didn’t catch COVID.