For a while there I didn’t think I’d survive it, but I did.
The above statement is pure hyperbole, of course. I was never worried about survival, only about exertion and inconvenience, in the way of old men. In actual fact, the weekend went just fine.
A friend drove me to a rental place on Friday, to pick up a car. I got a Buick Enclave, which served me impeccably. This was the first time I’d ever driven a car with those new touch screen controls, and I was a little uneasy about it. But I worked it out all right. (Still prefer buttons and knobs, though.)
What surprised me about the car was that the shifter was located on the steering column. I haven’t driven a car with “three on the tree” (D, N, and R in this case) for many years. I find this configuration an odd choice for an SUV. Don’t we buy those things in order to at least pretend we’re powering across the tundra, up mountains, and through swamps in something like a classic Jeep? The steering column shifter lets that fantasy dribble away completely.
Anyway, I got up at 5:30 a.m. the next morning, so I could be at the set-up point by 8:00 a.m. My awning was already in place there, ever since last weekend, but the stall needed setting up, and books needed to be set on tables. The weather was chilly, more appropriate for the time of year than the unseasonable heat of the weekend previous.
Both days went fine. Saturday was sunny, and the shade under my awning crept steadily back until I was sitting in a corner. Good sales, mostly of Viking Legacy. I sold that out completely on Saturday. Sunday was cloudy, but not as rainy as we feared.
My book sales were a surprise to me. The ambience of Viking Fest Minnesota was (and businesswise this was brilliant, I think) historic Viking side by side with Renaissance Faire cosplay. The central camp was kept historically pristine, so that I, with my paperback books, had to operate outside in the vendors’ area, next to a woman who sold cute sculptures of mushrooms. But I was just at the entrance to the Authentic Camp, thus occupying a kind of intermediate state, like Plato in Dante’s Limbo.
One would think that this would be the perfect place to sell historical fantasy novels. And yet, sales of those were only so-so. What people wanted was the hard history of Viking Legacy.
I must ponder this mystery.
In any case, my old bones made it through two days of the festival, and I got home safe and sound, and with a little money in my pocket. Special thanks to the young men of the Viking Age Club & Society, Sons of Norway, for toting that barge, lifting that bale, and taking the load off me in general.
Next job – figure out what to do about my car.
It is good to read all went so well, and intriguing to learn of the history over fiction preference manifested!
While you were hard at work, I had the good hap to pick up a copy of Tolkien’s colleague and friend, Gwyn Jones’s A History of the Vikings (1968) – and for only 80 euro cent!
And I have embarked on Dr. Pamela Nagami’s LibriVox audiobook of the fascinating Arthur Henry Johnson’s The Normans in Europe (1877). His Wikipedia article notes, among other things, “Despite having graduated several years earlier, and being an ordained clergyman, Johnson was selected as a member of the University team that played in the 1874 FA Cup Final, although all the other ten members of the side were undergraduates” – and they won! And who was described at his death in 1927 as “one of the most prominent figures in Oxford life for upwards of sixty years” – which included both Tolkien and Lewis’s undergraduate days and the early years of their teaching at Oxford.