Creative frenzy, chocolate, and Pegasus Awards

Above: A photo that Beckett Gladney took of the Sunday night folk-rock jam at OVFF. I'm in the lower left part of the photo beside Allison & Jodi, sitting on the floor with Michelle, Taunya, Batya, Eloise, Carol, Judi and Jordan (A note to other con report authors: Jordan prefers her full name over "Jordi" these days, I believe). I love Beckett's comment on Flickr about this photo: "Very cool to be in a room with so many people who are all singing along and really just enjoying the music and the companionship. And that's really what filk is all about." You can see more of Beckett's photos in her Flickr account.



My cheque for the Writer's Digest webzine article came yesterday. Yay for cheques! Yesterday I did some novel writing and finished the comics for the NaNoWriMo Web site. I also finished recording two flute tracks for Seanan McGuire to use on a track for her CD; I figure she can pick and choose the bits she wants to keep. I may send more if this first part seems to go smoothly, which it isn't. My problem is getting them to Jeff Bohnhoff in California, who has kindly offered to extract the instrumental bits from the Garageband file.

I've tried YouSendIt.com and DropLoad.com but both services seemed to hang on me when I tried uploading. The file is about 37 MB. I'll try again today. I may have to send a CD with the file by (*gasp) snailmail.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, the student newspaper at Concordia University is going to be reprinting one of my Will Write For Chocolate NaNoWriMo-themed comics in this week's issue; they've promised to mail me a copy. My Inkygirl cartoons are being used in several writing courses, including Kaplan University. I keep forgetting to mention stuff like this; if I was more organized, I'd be adding these to my work portfolio site.

In theory, my comics should start appearing on the NaNoWriMo Web site every weekday starting tomorrow, until the end of November.



After dinner, I finally finished the Chocolate Song, yay! It's a fairly short song, but with five vocal parts; even when compressed to an MP3, the file was 7.4 MB. Now the challenge is to communicate it properly. I think it'll be easiest if Allison and Jodi learn it first, record their parts, then I send that file to Eva & Crystal (who are in Germany) along with the soundfiles containing just their parts, lyrics/chords & and musical score of their parts.

We won't have a chance to actually rehearse together until next January at GAfilk, of course. You ARE all going to GAfilk, aren't you?!?

Hey, this is the third song I've written in a few weeks. Now I just need to get my J.K. Rowling song finished before this week's practice.



This new home recording studio set-up is making it SO much easier for me to write songs. Not having a real piano (the electronic keyboard is a pain to lug around each time I want to hook it up; I have to figure out a better layout) and not being able to play the guitar for more than a few minutes at a time made songwriting a frustrating process for the past two years. I used to always do my songwriting with guitar in hand, or at the piano.

Now, I can at least use the built-in MIDI instruments and the computer keyboard to play a simple bass line on which to build a melody. I supply the chords to Allison and leave it up to her to come up with an appropriate guitar part.




But back to another OVFF highlight: the Pegasus Awards concert. This is a performance of all the songs that were nominated for an award. You can find a list of this year's nominees here.




I've always found the Pegasus Awards concert to be an excellent chance to get an overview of different types of songs being performed in filk as well as a variety of performers. Sometimes, in cases where the regular performer of particular song isn't able to attend the convention, a different performer is chosen...this is always interesting because it's often a performer who doesn't normally cover the song.

Many thanks to the Pegasus Committee for administering and coordinating the Pegasus Awards: Daniel & Melissa Glasser, Trace Hagemann, Steve Macdonald, Seanan McGuire and Erica Neely.

And congrats to this year's winners:

Best Filk Song:
The Girl That's Never Been by Michelle Dockrey
Best Classic Filk Song:
I Want To Be Peter Lorre by Tom Smith
Best Performer:
Judi Miller
Best Writer/Composer:
Cynthia McQuillin
Best Battle Song:
March of Cambreadth by Heather Alexander
Best Torch Song:
X-Libris by Talis Kimberley

For more info about the Pegasus Awards, please visit the official site.