I’ll be doing a Viking event this weekend, and this time I’m giving you a whole day’s notice to make your plans to attend!
Because I love you and want you to be happy.
The Great Northern Viking Festival will be held Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 19 and 20th, in Mankato, Minnesota. I plan to be there Saturday only, and only for the “family friendly” daytime hours. In the evening, I’m informed, they will let their hair down a little (those who haven’t inflicted History Channel haircuts on themselves). I myself am too old – and too conventional – for such shenanigans.
This is the first year this event has been held. I have no idea what to expect, really. Several Viking groups will be present, each doing its own peculiar thing.
For all I know, it will be a heathen thing, and I’ll have to flee like a monk at Lindisfarne, shaking the dust from my feet as I scamper. But we’ll see. I’ve loaded my car with a substantial supply of good and uplifting books, either written or translated by me, which ought to raise the tone in any case.
Come by if you’re in the area and feel like checking it out.
The package arrived yesterday. At last, after many a year, I can hold a paper version of Hailstone Mountain in my tremblous hand.
The book is thinner than I expected. I suppose that’s because of the 6”x9” format – more words per page. I’m used to thinking in terms of what’s called “mass market paperbacks,” the roughly pocket-sized books you generally see on racks in stores (or used to). For some reason, we self-publishers seem to gravitate toward a larger size. Perhaps we’re compensating.
Maybe the cream paper that I didn’t select would have been a little thicker, too.
In any case, my books are my children, and I’ve known this one only electronically up to now. Like having a kid whose mother took custody and then moved to California – you only know him through Zoom calls. Now at last he’s made his way to my doorstep. He needs money, of course.
I wonder how I should deal with selling these things at Viking events, as one by one they get instantiated in the physical universe. My bestseller at events is Viking Legacy. After that, it’s The Year of the Warrior (the paper version I have printed, not yet available on Amazon). West Oversea comes in third. This one follows in the sequence. I figure demand for each successive book should be smaller than for the previous one. I anticipate carrying a couple cartons of the later books of the saga with me to events, but I don’t imagine I’ll have to stock as many of those. It’s already a lot of cartons to lug around.
At the festival in Green Bay, I was signing somebody’s book and they complimented my handwriting. This surprised me. I’ve always considered my handwriting awful, for the practical reason that it’s hard to read. My writing may possess a certain grace of form, but it’s not pragmatically effective.
I wish my art to be useful as well as aesthetic. But not enough to write slower.
The Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay is, once again, history (in two senses). I made the four-hour-plus drive to and from without incident, and had an excellent time.
I shared a motel room with the experimental archaeologist who oversaw the construction of the Viking House, on the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay campus, that is the centerpiece of the encampment. His name is Owen Christianson and he is a physicist (I really didn’t understand his descriptions of his work, but it has something to do with electromagnetics) by day. He’s also a recognized folk artist, and I once took his class in making wooden stave vessels. He was by himself this year because his wife was unable to come along. I was somewhat daunted by his credentials at first, but we actually found a lot to talk about, and parted good friends.
The festival itself runs Friday and Saturday. Friday is a day for school groups; it went okay, but was rather quiet. I feared we were losing public enthusiasm. But Saturday, as it was last year, was a madhouse, and people bought up nearly my whole stock of Viking Legacy (I’d brought extra this year) along with a fair quantity of my novels. I was in no wise disappointed.
As is more and more the case these days, the hard part for me was setting up, tearing down, and packing the car. I’m getting too old for this stuff, I fear, but I expect to keep at it for a while. I’m too proud to hang it up, I imagine, until I actually hurt myself. (Much thanks to Andy and Missy, especially, for helping me tote that barge and lift that bale.)
We got handsome coverage from a local TV station, and I was fortunate enough to get a lot of the air time. I’m the devilishly handsome man in the blue tunic, in case you were wondering.
I am, of course, keenly aware of the irony of holding a Viking festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of the Packers. Yet so it is. Life does not always make sense, as I think Nietzsche observed.
In any case, I plan (by God’s travel mercies) to be at the Midwest Viking Festival this Friday and Saturday, selling my books in the ancient Norse manner. I guess I’ll also be doing some kind of presentation. Come and see if you’re in the area.
This is me with a Norwegian Forest Cat. I’m the bigger one, but only slightly bigger.
I think I can do my promised post on Høstfest tonight, before time and senescence wipe all recollection from my mind. I’m gradually recovering from the rigors of travel, and expect to be fit for duty on Thursday, when I have to drive four hours to Green Bay, for the Midwest Viking Festival on Friday and Saturday.
How was Høstfest 2024? From my point of view (and I think I speak for all the Vikings), it was a smash. Among the highlights were these:
First of all, we were in a new location. Over the years (and a lot of years it’s been in my case) the festival has shoehorned the Viking encampment into any space they could find after the really important exhibitors had been accommodated. But now at last they placed us next to the Log Cabin (used, I understand, for Fur Trapper rendezvouses), right across from the main entrance to the exhibition/entertainment building.
This meant, first of all, that people could find us. The chief complaint we’ve gotten from Viking afficionados over the years is that nobody ever seemed to know where we were. This year we were front and center – and the visitor numbers were correspondingly gratifying.
It also meant that we were in the fresh air, where – strictly speaking – Vikings belong. An American log cabin isn’t so different from a Scandinavian one after all (Swedish immigrants invented them), and the weather was pleasant (sometimes, in fact, pretty darn warm).
Now if you know me at all, you know that I’m not numbered among the Great Outdoorsmen of this world. But even a couch tuber like me could feel the difference, spending four days in God’s sunshine and fresh air, as opposed to four days on concrete under fluorescent lights (often breathing the dust of a horse barn). I was tired at the end, but I didn’t feel as if I’d spent the time confined to a jail cell, as in the past.
I also sold a good number of books. And the local hosts who gave me a bed for four nights were extremely pleasant and congenial.
Each day, at 2:45 p.m., I went to an inside stage to sit on a stool next to a very beautiful woman who interviewed me about my writing and translating, as well as Viking history. I could tell she was in awe of me, but retained my dignity.
I even found a vendor who sold me some Norwegian Kvikk Lunsj candy bars, which are like Kit Kat except really, really good.
I drove home weary in body but quite fizzy in spirit, as Bertie Wooster might have put it. And as usual I stopped for lunch on the way with my friend (and commenter on this blog) Dale Nelson, which is always a pleasure.
I suppose Høstfest 2024 could have gone better for me, but offhand I can’t think how.
So what’s going on, you’re no doubt asking. Any progress on The Baldur Game? How’s the translation coming? How do you justify your barren existence?
The Baldur Game is essentially ready for publication. I don’t think I’ll even give it another read-through. A man has to say “enough” at some point.
The hang-up remains the cover. It is being delayed due to circumstances I don’t know, but am confident are good and sufficient. No doubt it’s God’s will that we have a pre-Christmas release. Or a post-Christmas release.
So what am I doing with my famous writing time? I’m preparing my first Amazon paperback edition.
I chose Hailstone Mountain for this experiment. It would be good to do The Year of the Warrior, but there are certain technical problems with that book that I’ll feel more comfortable confronting once I’ve done a simpler book first. A paperback TYOTW does exist; I’m having it printed privately and I lug it around to Viking events and hand-sell it. But I’ll want to get it on Amazon eventually. Sooner rather than later, I hope.
Then there’s West Oversea, the second (or technically third) book in the series. That work has been published both as an e-book and as a paperback by Nordskog Publishing of Ventura, California. But I recently got word that Nordskog is going out of business. The publication rights will revert to me, and I’ve made a deal to buy their entire stock of the paperback. These I plan to hand-sell at Viking events, as I have been doing. But there will need to be an Amazon paperback too – perhaps with a new cover. Can’t get at that until everything’s nailed down with Nordskog.
That leaves Hailstone Mountain. That one belongs to me alone, and has been published for Kindle since 2013. I’m now working the manuscript over to fit Amazon’s requirements, and I’m nearing the end of those revisions. I may manage to make it available on Amazon before the end of the month (barring glitches, which are always possible. Even likely) except…
I’ll be out of town most of next week. Off to Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota, as I have done for so many years. Four days of living like a Viking – except for minor technicalities like modern plumbing, sleeping in a host’s bed, and fast food. Stop in and see me if you’re in the Minot area. It’s convenient to… Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, I guess.
The following weekend I’ll be (God willing) at the Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Which is entirely unreasonable in terms of miles driven for a man of my age, I think, but my book sales were really good last year, and they’ve invited me to be more heavily involved in the program. Which is flattering, because this involves high-level reenactors and genuine scholars.
I won’t get a break the weekend after that, either, as I have a meeting to attend on Saturday in northwestern Minnesota. Which will seem like a short drive after the others. Also, thank goodness, I’ll get to wear modern clothes. (You’d think Viking clothes would be comfortable, but I find they get old pretty fast.)
As for the translation job, I’m feeling good about it. My plan requires me to do 100 pages-plus each month for the next five months. I’m up to about page 85 now, and I’ve still got a few days to fill up my measure for September, even with time off for festivals and frivolity. It’s looking okay.
(Note to potential house robbers – my renter is at home pretty much perpetually now. My place will not be empty, and the booby traps will be set.)
In his book on the bookselling business, Joseph Shaylor notes Dr. Johnson’s recommendation for sharing sales revenue among all participants in the year 1776, saying “the country bookseller selling a book published at twenty shillings” should retain 3 shillings 6 pence from the sale. No less than that is possible, the good doctor writes, because booksellers operate on paper-thin margins (ba-dum-ching). Writing in 1911, Shaylor notes the same was true during his career and makes this important business principle:
All retail establishments exist either to create a want or to supply one. This applies equally to a bookseller — either he must help to educate the public to be lovers of books, or he must simply exist to supply such books as an educated public requires. The former is to be desired, and the greater the inducements held out to encourage men and women of intellectual aptitude to be distributors of books the better it will be both for themselves and for the trade they represent.
— Shaylor, The Fascination of Books with Other Papers on Books & Bookselling
Perhaps even more than publishers, booksellers need to cultivate a market both of readers and people who appreciate owning books themselves. In that vein, David Kern, proprietor of Goldberry Books in Concord, NC, reviews The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. “As recently as 1993, 13,499 independently run bookshops were open across the country,” and yet historian Evan Friss states, “Americans have never really been readers.”
Last week for National Read-A-Book Day, a Philadelphia Barnes and Noble invited two dozen authors “to come down to the store, sit in the leather chair in the window display outfitted with a side table and lamp, and silently read a favorite book.” The store manager said her staff thought it a crazy idea, but the authors loved it.
Tomorrow (Saturday, Aug. 10) I plan to be (God willing) among the Vikings at the Crow Wing Viking Festival in Brainerd, Minnesota. More information here.
I will have books to sell, and may be persuaded to sign them for you if you ask nicely.
Silver, livestock and thralls will be accepted in payment.
%20(Facebook%20Cov-df83507.png/:/rs=w:1160,h:652)
