I left my mirror in Colorado. A summary of Dragonsteel Nexus 2025.

I just got back from my last event for the year. Dragonsteel Nexus 2025. What a trip! It was the second most profitable event of the year.

The challenge with this trip is that it happened in Salt Lake City, Utah. I live in North Georgia. It’s about 2,000 miles away. I shared a booth with two other author friends, Richard Fierce and Alfred Muller(AJ). We had to take all of our inventory and ourselves across the country. If it were for two people, I’d say throw everything in the van and hit the road. I’ve done it many times. It’s the reason I bought a minivan. With three people that doesn’t work for two reasons.

1. There isn’t enough room for three people, all our inventory, and equipment.

2. It would put us over the weight limit of the van even if we could fit it.

I started looking at options to solve these problems. We could ship everything to Utah but that’s pricy. How pricy? We talked to an author friend who shipped books. The convention center had in the contract that they would store product for free. He didn’t see that there was a handling fee in the fine print. So much per pound. He showed up to the event and got a bill for $600. So, pay a lot to ship stuff, pay a lot to the convention for receiving it, and pay for plane tickets/transportation there, and still not have everything I would normally take? That wasn’t going to work for me.

I started doing research. I use trailers a lot but I didn’t have an adequate trailer for this trip. I had been kicking around the idea of getting a trailer for situations like this. At Dragon Con this year, I handled a signing for Matt Dinniman. I took so many of his books I had the van fully loaded and had to use another car to haul it all in a single trip. I started looking for trailers. I did a ton of research about towing capacity, GVWR(gross vehicle weight rating), and  cargo volume, and settled on a very nice 6x8 with a 3,500lb axle. It should safely do everything I needed for the foreseeable future. Purchased! I spent some extra money and put some Sidestreet Book Market Decals on the side. Why? Safety. There are some people that break into trailers to see if they can score tools and the like to sell for quick cash. I want everyone to know there’s nothing inside they would want to steal and hopefully prevent break-ins.

On Saturday, Nov. 29^th , I loaded the trailer up and headed over to Richad’s house. Neither him, nor AJ, had pulled a trailer before. They were nervous about it. Going from zero experience to hauling for 4,000 miles round trip is a real trial by fire. We did a little test run. They drove the trailer out and back to fill up the van, then we loaded it up, and went to bed. It was another one of those nights where I couldn’t sleep. I got three hours of sleep and was up at three in the morning. We piled into the car at seven and hit the road.

We had a rotating driving schedule where we changed drivers at every fill up and whoever paid for the gas drove that tank of gas. On the way out, we were filling up every three to three and a half hours. We had 3 hours of driving to six hours of passengering(If that’s not a word, it is now). This went well for the most part. We had a hard time sleeping, and I don’t think anyone fit more than an hour and a half of sleep at any time. We hit snow in Kansas. It wasn’t like any snow I’d seen before. It was very fluffy and would blow around freely. We had a clear path in the right hand lane where the snow couldn’t collect, so it didn’t really matter, until we were passed. When a car passed us all the snow that had collected in that lane took to the air and reduced the visibility to absolute zero. I’m talking smoke screen from Spy Hunter visibility for anyone old enough to know the reference. Luckily, the roads in Kansas are perfectly straight. So we just had to cut speed, keep straight, and it would clear after a few seconds. It was in Kansas I was in danger of falling asleep at the wheel. I pulled off at a random exit and found a church parking lot right off the interstate where we parked for two hours to recharge the batteries.

When we woke, the windshield had a coating of snow, and we slid around a bit getting back onto the interstate. On the interstate, the roads were in good shape. We hit some slush when we got into Colorado, but it all worked out. I had to pull over again in the final stretch in Utah, but AJ was better rested and drove us in. In total it took us 36 hours, it was rough, but we made it.  

After a good night’s sleep we ended up with an extra day in Utah. We didn’t have to load in until Wednesday, so we unhooked the trailer and hit the town. We went down to Provo and visited Moon’s Rare Books. I didn’t know it existed. It has all kinds of books and artifacts. The staff was very nice. One staff member produced a first edition Return of the King signed by Tolkien and a first edition Harry Potter signed by Daniel Radcliff. We suspect he was about eleven years old when he signed the Harry Potter book and he put (Harry) in parenthesis just to make sure the reader would know who he was. Funny! After that, we stopped by a museum and saw some awesome dinosaur fossils. Just a great day.

On Wednesday, the load in almost went smoothly. We had my trusty cart loaded up. While we were wheeling it in, we hit a pothole in the sidewalk and bent the entire front of the cart at the welds. It was still usable if we limped things in with it. It was a $400 cart I’ve been using for years, so it hurt when it broke. We didn’t have other options though. I ordered a replacement, the offroad version with bigger front tires. I got lucky and they were on sale or something. It only cost $200 to replace but there was no way I was getting it to use at this event so we had to make due with the broken cart.

Matt Dinniman was going to be there. I talked to him about taking some of his books and he came by and signed them. We had everything in place and waited around for a bit. There was talk that Brandon Sanderson would be making the rounds to meet all the vendors. Sure enough, he did. He had a crew with him, including cameras. We got to shake his hand and chat for a few minutes. He’s taller than he looks in videos. He’s also a delight. They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. If your hero is Brandon Sanderson, I think it’s okay to break that rule. He mentioned how nice my deluxe edition was. I told him about the ten color illustrations and in passing said “no AI”. I got a fist bump. Nice.

The show starts Thursday and right off the bat things are popping. My first sale was five minutes in. It wasn’t Dungeon Crawler Carl either. Paxor Seven was moving like hot cakes.

After a full day of hustling, I was lying in my hammock when a message came through over the vendor discord. There was an emergency! Mr. Sanderson had an event the next night that was in jeopardy. His team had made these custom bookmark nametags but they were unable to secure tassels for the nametags. It was a disaster. Katy, one of the higher ups on his staff, was asking for ideas for any way to get tassels last minute. I just happened to have unopened boxes of tassels in the booth for my bookmarks. We swapped a few messages and I gave her directions on where they were. They retrieved them from the booth. I wouldn’t accept reimbursement, they aren’t expensive and I wouldn’t need them for the show, they were my backup tassels. Instead, I asked Katy for a favor. I told her about Sidestreet and asked her to pass on that if Sanderson wanted to sell books at Dragon Con, consider working with me. Katy stopped by the next morning and returned the unused tassels and gave me a very nice pin as a thank you and said she would pass my info about Sidestreet to the team that handles that stuff. Most likely, nothing will come of it, but what if... I was also declared “Hero of Dragonsteel”. No Joke.

The last two days of the show went well. Sales continued to be strong. Load out went smooth, expect wrestling with the broken cart. We decided to use the same strategy for the ride home. We took a more southernly route to hopefully avoid snow. It worked. The roads were excellent all the way home. Coming out of Colorado  I started seeing herds of large animals. My first thought was Elk but they didn’t look right. Then it hit me, Mule Deer! Mule deer everywhere! I even saw two bucks with huge racks fighting in a field, antlers locked, like something off the Discovery Channel. It was amazing. There had to be easily over 100 of them in sporadic herds for miles. We were just getting out of the mountains around sunset. Richard was driving. There’s a herd on the side of the road. As we are passing the herd, a doe gets antsy. I don’t know if she decided life is just too much and she can’t take it anymore or if she just chose violence, but she charges the van. WHAM! This was not ideal… We pulled over to inspect the damage. She contacted the passenger side mirror first and it disappeared leaving a stubby mirror arm attached to the door. Then she rolled down the side of the van and left some hair imbedded the back tire. If that was it, I would say she could have lived with a story the other mule deer would say she was lying about behind her back. But we were pulling a trailer. She hit the pointy front end and then dented up the fender. I don’t know if the trailer ran over her or not. So my new trailer got customized by a mule deer on its first outing. The van was fine, minus the missing mirror. Everything seemed functional, so we hit the road. Not having the mirror made the lane changes more challenging, but we made it through the rest of the trip unscathed. I dropped off Richard and AJ and drove two hours back to my house. In total, another 36 hour trip.

It was a roller coaster. I made some new author friends, made $6,800, have to replace my favorite cart and my second favorite mirror, and I laughed more than I have in a long time. Maybe that’s from being loopy from lack of sleep. I think it was just from being my most fun trip of the year.