After the call ended, Dave yawned and stretched, concentration finally broken. He realized he hadn't even touched the coffee he'd made hours before, and he really needed to use the bathroom again, anyway. Another yawn told him he could stand to get some sleep after being up all night -- but he realized he'd better not sleep too long or his schedule was going to be well and truly loused up. Get a couple hours, he thought, and he might be able to get something done. He didn't even bother with taking his clothes off, just collapsed on the bed and fell asleep instantly. He'd planned to only sleep a couple hours but didn't wake up until Kayla brought the boys home from school.

It still took another couple days for Dave to get his life back to something resembling normal. He did, after all, have his regular work to do, and now he was behind. There was a major rush factor on Castle Wyrthingham, but fortunately it was in pretty good shape, so he knew he could push through on it. Maiden of Hvalfjordjur could wait a bit. Wings of Tregedar, Larissa Hamilton's next work, at least the part that had been written, was waiting in his FTP folder on the Dunlap & Fyre server, and he started off by giving it a quick once over. It was much, much better than her earlier effort. Knowing her history with Dunlap & Fyre, and to show her there was interest in her and the new novel, he decided to put some time into a fast critique and get it off to her before he got to work on the steampunk fantasy.

Much though he wanted to dive headfirst into his own book, which still didn't have a name, he knew he could only devote a part of his energies to it. He decided, for the moment, he'd limit his time on the book to the mornings when he was freshest, and then devote the afternoons and some evening time to his regular work. That meant the time he spent walking the boys to school and wandering over to the Spee-D-Mart afterwards would often be spent trying to get his mind organized on his fictional world.

At that, he couldn't just bail off into writing it. In the first days he wrote several brief "test" scenes, just to try out the concept, suspecting little of them would actually make it into the final work but could give him a feel for the flow of the writing. He spent more of his time organizing his outline, and compiling a handbook of the life and customs of his dystopian universe, and especially "Sinsy", the town where much of the early action would take place. He began developing a file of biographies of his major characters, naming more of them now, getting a feel of who they were and what they were like. It still involved a great deal of imagination.

He drew Shae into his thinking about the novel early on -- and soon realized he needed to listen to her comments and suggestions. She was a great help with the art and the pace of the storytelling, a subject Dave thought he knew a great deal about until one evening Shae read one of the test sections back to him over the phone. A single hearing of it from her lips drove home to him the improvements that needed to be made.

Having the book to work on, along with everything else, really made the days fly by. He was waiting for Shae to arrive a couple days before Thanksgiving, eight days after he'd gotten home, and he couldn't believe it had been that long.

Avalon's shooting schedule was a little goofy because of the holiday, so Shae only had to work on Monday. On Tuesday, she drove to Bradford for an event she and Dave had carefully kept secret from Tyler and Cameron. A month before, Roberta Wisner, the boys' kindergarten teacher, had told Dave and Shae about the kids telling their classmates about their Aunt Shae, and they'd worked out a surprise: Shaella Sunrise would make a surprise visit to the Bradford kindergarten.

To make the surprise even more interesting, Dave had the brilliant idea of asking Dayna and Sandy to be part of the visit. Part of their business was to do school shows, especially for young kids, and they had several costume acts in their repertoire. The two wandering medieval minstrels showed up at the house after Dave got back from taking the boys to school, and the three women spent some time working out a special routine or two.

Of course, Dave wasn't going to miss the show, but he stayed well in the background while it went down. It was all a big surprise for the kids, starting off with Sandy, dressed in one of her medieval outfits, going into each of the three kindergarten rooms with a piccolo and doing a "Pied Piper" routine, leading the kids to the school auditorium. Once everybody got settled down, Shae came bounding into the middle of the group, dressed in the Shaella Sunrise outfit. Many of the kids recognized her right off, and the excitement mounted. She interacted with the kids a little and told them a couple stories, some from the show and some not, while Dayna and Sandy gave some depth to the story with their instruments. While Shae took a break, Dayna and Sandy did a piece of one of their own performances, then Shae told a couple more stories. It went off very well, in spite of it being casual and unrehearsed. Tyler and Cameron got to prove they weren't boasting about their Aunt Shae, the kids all had a ball, and Dave had enjoyed watching Dayna and Sandy work about as much as he had enjoyed watching Shae.

As they picked up after the performance, Dayna commented to Shae, "You're pretty darn good at your stories. If you ever want to go out on the road with us to school dates, I think we could fit you into the regular act."

"Yeah," Sandy agreed. "You really do a great job with the storytelling. You had me about as sucked in as the kids."

"You never know," Shae laughed. "I might just have to take you up on that. Avalon isn't going to last forever, and then I'll have to find something else to do."

"On the topic of something else to do," Dayna replied. "Would you and Dave like to come over and hang out some time? Like, maybe Friday night?"

"Yeah, that sounds like fun," Shae agreed. "I've really wanted to spend some time with you guys but our schedules never seem to match up."

"Comes from being out on the road a lot," Dayna smiled. "Come on over about six and I'll throw some burgers on the grill. No point in eating heavy after being stuffed from Thanksgiving the day before."

The next day, Dave, Shae, and the boys headed across the street for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner -- except that it really wasn't at all traditional in Dave's family. Two or three times when Dave was young, he and JoAnne went to dinner with distant relatives, but as he'd grown older it had mostly stopped for some reason, and often Thanksgiving came down to the two of them, plus often Hazel. He and Julie had been back for Thanksgiving a couple times, but it really wasn't much bigger, especially since the boys were still small. The last time they'd just gone out to the Country Kettle for dinner rather than going through all the hassle.

This time, though, JoAnne decided that the time had come for the traditional feast. Dave couldn't help but wonder if perhaps it was a subconscious desire to impress him with life in Bradford enough to get him to stay permanently, or just wanting to impress Shae, but in any case it promised to be an experience. And with JoAnne, Hazel, and Shae there along with him and the boys, it would be the largest Thanksgiving dinner he could recall. The last couple Thanksgiving dinners had been at the Albrights. They had always seemed a bit sterile to Dave, if for no more reason than he perceived that Stan and Deborah didn't really like him much and blamed him at least in part for Julie's decision to stay working in the brokerage business in New York. He'd only talked to them a couple times since he'd left the city and had experienced rather stiff conversation from them. It probably wasn't a fun holiday around the Albright house today, he thought.

Not so around the Patterson house. JoAnne and Hazel had obviously been cooking well before he, Shae, and the boys walked across the street along in the afternoon; there was still a great deal of hustle and bustle in the kitchen, and he knew well enough to stay out of the way. Before long, though, the two older women got the meal on the table -- and there was a great deal to eat: turkey and the trimmings of course, but salads, several different vegetables, a number of other specialty dishes. When you got right down to it, it probably was the most sumptuous meal he'd ever sat down to around his mother's table. They ate and ate and ate some more, and finally, when everybody was groaning, they found themselves faced with several choices of cake and pie for dessert. "Can we hold off for a little while to let things settle a bit?" Dave groaned.

They all decided that would be a good idea -- it would allow them to pack more dessert aboard -- and staggered to the living room, the adults with coffee. The boys were so overloaded that they soon fell asleep, tempting Dave to do the same, but he just sat back and watched as Shae got into a discussion with Hazel.

For that matter, Dave had never really known Hazel well. Although he had been aware his mother and the shorter, heavier woman had been friends of a sort all though his school days in Bradford, the friendship never really blossomed until he was out of school and at Columbia. The two women spent a lot of time together, often eating together, sometimes going places together, just good, close friends who didn't have anyone at home to keep them company. There had been times Dave had wondered if there was a lesbian relationship, but never saw anything to prove the suspicion other than just the spending a lot of time together. As Dave just sat back and listened to Shae talking with the two, he realized it was just exactly what it seemed, a pair of good friends and nothing more.

Eventually they stirred enough to try on some blueberry pie, and then some pumpkin pie. As the afternoon wound down, a lot of hands were needed to carry some leftovers back across the street to Dave's house; it appeared he and the boys would be working on the leftovers for days. He and Shae were still aching and groaning from all the food when they went to bed a couple hours after the boys went down. For once nothing happened between the two of them besides a quick soulful kiss followed by some heavy sleeping.

Dave had really wanted to spend some time learning more about Dayna and Sandy -- but, as Dayna had said, they were on the road a lot, and there just hadn't been any chance for him to get together with them. He knew the two musicians had a huge stock of good stories, and led an adventurous and different life. He made arrangements for JoAnne to watch the boys the next evening, and about six they showed up at Dayna and Sandy's house, which was a couple blocks up the street from Kevin and Emily's. It was a nice house, an older two-story brick bungalow. "We mostly live downstairs," Sandy explained. "Office and storage is upstairs, and right now we're jammed to the gills. We even have Second Home stacked about half full of CDs."

"We just got a delivery a couple days ago, and this time of year the place is often pretty full. We try to keep boxes out of the living area, though."

"These are your CDs?" Shae asked. "I thought you had a distributor or were with a company or something."

"No, we do most of our own distribution," Dayna explained. "We are signed up with a distributor, but they don't do much for us despite a big cut of the profits. We discovered a long time ago that we're better off as independents."

"I'm afraid I don't know much about your careers," Shae said. "Dave and Emily told me a little about what you do, that's all."

"It's a long story," Dayna said. "The short version is that Sandy and I met in college and started playing renaissance faires, busking the streets, and picking up gigs here and there. We liked doing that a lot better than we liked going to college, so when we had a few bucks saved, we bought Home, quit college, and went on the road. We did pretty well, and then we met a guy who told us about how we could make our own CDs and make a good profit from selling them, so we started doing it on a real small level. Things went real well for several years, we were on the road almost all the time, and we went everywhere and back again, and we were sticking some money back for the future.

"Then in the summer of '94 we both picked up salmonella; we're not sure where, but we think it was as a grubby little restaurant we stopped at while on the road. That turned into a really nasty staph infection, and we were months getting over it. Since we were both in and out of the hospital, we were separated, each staying with our own folks, and that pretty well screwed things up."

"Yeah," Sandy snorted. "My folks had never been happy about the two of us being together and on the road, and they had this guy they wanted me to marry. They finally tricked me into it, and the only way they managed it was because I was so drugged up I didn't know what was going on. The guy was a real asshole, but I wasn't in good enough shape to do anything about it. I got better though, and one night, he beat me up and left. I knew Vicky was living pretty close by, so I called her for help, and the next morning she had me on a plane for Las Vegas and a divorce. I owe her a lot for that."

"Things weren't real great on my side, either," Dayna continued the story. "We'd had some money in the bank but the medical expenses blew through it quick. By the time I was better again, I was just about broke; I had Home, about five thousand CDs and two renfaire dates coming up. I really wasn't in shape to do the dates, but Emily and Vicky and some of the other '88s stayed with me and babied me. We sold a lot of CDs, and I got my finances back together while developing a solo act but not having much fun with it. I was out on the road in Nebraska when I called my folks and found out Sandy was in Vegas getting a divorce, and I just about set a land speed record getting there."

"Seeing Home pull up was the happiest thing in my life," Sandy interjected.

"Seeing Sandy again was mine," Dayna smiled. "Anyway, we brushed up our act while she finished her divorce, did a few gigs around Vegas while we were there, and when the divorce was final we hit the road again. Well, to make a long story short, we talked it over a lot and decided we'd made some mistakes. We'd let our desire to just have fun get in the way of things we really should have been doing, so over the course of the next summer we decided to reorganize a few things. We realized, we weren't getting all we could out of the CD sales, and to do it, we were going to need a home base. Besides we'd decided we didn't want to be on the road all the time. That winter we came back here, where Mom and Dad could keep an eye on things, and bought this house since they were thinking about moving to a smaller place with all us kids gone. The mortgage was a little steep, but they helped us out, and besides, we really needed space to store CDs."

They went on to tell the Ashley Montague story -- the "rest of the story" version: while much of their music was renaissance faire stuff, deep down inside their main love was pop, of the bluesier persuasion. Their best known song out of this genre was Pick Me Please, which was on their early 1996 album, Together Forever, the first after their reunion. It was a cute if plaintive little song that sounded like a girl at a high school dance, hoping a boy would come and dance with her. Both Dayna and Sandy thought it was nothing particularly special, but a highly promoted teenybopper singer by the name of Ashley Montague must have really liked it. She recorded it the following year, and didn't bother to clear copyrights on it.

Dayna and Sandy first heard Ashley Montague's version of Pick Me Please while driving down the road between renfaires one day. They thought her bubblegummer voice did a better job with it than Dayna's husky, more adult-sounding bluesy sound. It both pleased them that someone had picked it up and upset them that no one had asked them for permission. 'Upset' turned to pure pissed off when they got back to Bradford a couple months later to find a letter from Montague's attorneys demanding royalties on their recording of Pick Me Please. Within minutes they were on the phone to their old friend in Nashville who had gotten them started doing their own recordings in the first place, and within minutes more they were talking to one of the best copyright attorneys in a town full of them.

It took over a year for the smoke to clear, but even after the hefty lawyer's cut, the check for punitive damages was more than enough to pay off the house and go a long way toward the purchase of Second Home.

"So that left us set up pretty well," Dayna explained. "We decided that we really needed to set up as a company, rather than just a couple individuals. Tax is much of it, but part of it was a much better rate on health insurance, which we learned about the real hard way. We've cut our touring back quite a bit. We still do a lot, but we like it, so that helps. But it helps to have a place to come home to once in a while."

Dave had already heard much of the story, in bits and pieces, but it was new to Shae. "I'm real impressed that you do your own records yourselves," she told them. "I'm amazed you can do that well."

"It didn't come overnight, and it didn't come without work," Dayna told them. "At first, it was just intended as a blow-off to our gigs and renfaire shows. Without getting into the economics too deeply, the first two albums we did, Genie in a Bottle and Faire Maiden, cost us about three bucks a CD to make, by the time we got through pressing, studio time, cover art, and all that stuff, and we really did it on the cheap. But we usually sold those for fifteen bucks a pop."

"Ordering a thousand of each seemed like a huge risk at the time," Sandy smiled.

"You were making twelve dollars a copy?" Shae asked. "I know people in recording, and they don't make anything like that."

"Not surprised," Dayna smiled. "You take that fifteen-dollar sticker price. In a normal recording, the first forty percent goes right to the retailer, and everybody else gets a cut along the way. A lot of the expenses are higher, too, like if you're doing a cover -- a song someone else has written and done before -- you have to clear the rights to the song, buy the right to do the song yourself from copyright holder, and it can be very expensive. We only do our own material, or songs that are long copyright-expired, so that's not an expense for us. To be simple about it, since we are our own producers and distributors, we're overcoming the relatively small sales."

Dave nodded in understanding. "It's very similar in the book business," he explained. "The production, distribution and retail expenses are so great that authors only get a very small cut. Of course if they hit big, they still make out, but if they only sell a couple thousand copies, in most cases everyone loses."

"Boy, that's the truth," Dayna replied. "In the early years, before we got sick, the CDs were just a blow-off to our act, some extra cash for being there, although as time went on, it got to be a more and more important part of it. But having to sell those 5,000 CDs without Sandy around taught me a lot. The summer after we got back together, we realized we were going to have to get more businesslike about the whole thing. We talked to a number of people who knew a lot about it. By the time we were done, we'd come up with several things. The next CD order we made, we had a prepaid return card included right inside the jewel case asking people if they'd like to sign up for our newsletter and get a catalogue of some of the other CDs we had available. At shows, we'd ask if people would like to sign up for our mailing list. By the time we got through with the summer, we had a couple thousand names, so that winter we put out our first newsletter, which included the announcement of our new album as well as a rough schedule of where we intended to be. We basically paid the cost of the mailing and the overhead cost of the CD production within a month of the mailing going out."

"That really opened our eyes," Sandy agreed. "We realized we were going to have to get more professional still."

"So, we did," Dayna said. "Since we were out on the road so much, we got my mother to handle the receiving orders and shipping, and we even pay her a salary. We send out two, sometimes three newsletters a year now, and the last mailing was 12,700. Well, over the next couple years, we kept hearing more and more about selling over the Internet, and then when we had the tenth class reunion, I got to talking with Sonja Tyler about it. It turned out she was working odd jobs while trying to be a stay-at-home mom, and she was getting into the website development business. So, Sonja designed us a website, with online ordering and credit card payments. It started off slowly at first, but got better once we started promoting the website at shows and including the URL in the newsletter and in the CD art. Now, a good quarter of our orders are coming in through the website and it increases every month."

Dave shook his head. "It sure seems to me like you've turned what's a stumbling block for many groups into a real winner."

"It wouldn't work for everybody," Dayna shrugged. "We've got a solid, almost-national following of renfaire fans, and that's the core of everything. We actually enjoy pop and blues more; those fans are a little harder to pin down, so we don't see as much sales from them. Still, with everything, it's given us a good income that's reasonably steady, and we're putting money in the bank."

"Most artists of whatever form can't say that," Shae observed. "I know a lot of people who if they're not working day jobs, are living hand to mouth to be able to practice their art."

"Doesn't surprise me," Dayna smiled. "Hell, Sandy and I were two of them for a long time. But, you know, the first time I opened a gig bag down at the Hawthorne Mall and had people dropping money in it, I realized one very important thing."

"What's that?" Dave asked.

"'You know,' I told myself, 'This beats the hell out of working.' And it still does."

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