Author Christopher Schmitz

You don't want to miss this gleeman!

I’m impressed by your books, Christopher, but I’m more impressed by your lifestyle!

Isn’t this the cutest, most clever set up you’ve seen in like forever! Needless to say, Christopher sells his books at Ren Faires! I’ve done a few of those myself, but when I mentioned to him I had issues with setting up a tent, he showed me his set up.

Tell me how this all started!

I started doing faires after doing several comic cons and wanting to expand my books into similar markets. Because I also play bagpipes, this makes it a good fit for me. I'm actually doing 15 different weekends across several faires. I mostly stick to those shows in Iowa or surrounding states.

3 memorable experiences...

I have a recurring fan who brought me art she'd done from my buddy cop satire (50 Shades of Worf is a murder mystery at a comic convention) which she'd drawn for part of a school project and this is her favorite book.

I'm known at the regional faires as the "naked bagpiper." In reality, I wear a kilt and boots... just no shirt--its always hot. I caught a guy who was staggering on his feet (I'd just watched him pound an entire bottle of mead) and his mother wasn't strong enough to hold him up... I gave him a bottle of water and he kept ogling me--I lift weights entirely for vanity reasons and this young guy starts drunkenly hitting on me with his mother apologizing profusely... "sorry, he get's a little bisexual when he's had too much to drink."

One of the shows I do is also done by an older gal who used to work for TSR (D&D's parent company/inventor) on a couple of games I played a lot when I was a teenager. I got to meet her and build a friendship; we get to hang out on occasion and talk about game design in the 80s and 90s.

Bonus story: I expanded my calendar to early and late months and so it can get too cold to go sans shirt, and so I decided to make a cloak. I couldn't find anyone to make what I wanted and so I had to do it myself. I wore it this April for the first time and got lots of compliments... but a couple folks even recognized it as a gleeman's cloak (from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, which is what it was supposed to be.)

Christopher has a Kickstarter going on right now and I’d love for you to give it a look. He obviously puts his entire life into his stories. A true bard…or Gleeman as Jordan would call him!