Urban Tapestry's Interfilk package for FilKONtario

Allison, Jodi and I are off to FilKONtario later today, but I wanted to post about our donation to Interfilk, for those attending the convention. Our package includes:

Above:

- Silver aluminium chainmail bracelet handcrafted by Allison.

- A CD version of Urban Tapestry's very first album, Castles & Skyscrapers, which was originally released as a cassette tape in 1994 and (I think) is no longer in print. The CD version (kindly donated by sound engineer Gerry Tyra, who did the conversion) is NOT COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE. We will be donating one copy to the FKO Interfilk auction, and one other copy to a convention we attend in the future. Cover artwork is by my sister.

This album was recorded at Sound Techniques Studio, and includes the following tracks: Donna's Song, Two Voices, I'll Be Fine, The Ancient Yearning, Urban Lullaby, My Jalapeno Man, Monica's Flight, Desert & Forest, Cuz He's A Guy, Margaret's Lament, This Is For You, Overdrawn Credit Card Blues.



Above and below: part of Jodi's contribution for our Interfilk package at FKO. A pen holder filled with strawberry cream candies and a classy burgundy pen with her Voiceovers and vocals logo.





Other items in the package:

- Painting by me, in acrylics on stretched canvas. Here's a close-up.

- Set of my letterpress cards from Blush Publishing in the UK.

- Selection of my self-published cards.

- A copy of my "Snowdreams" print.

- A copy of my nonfiction book, The Writer's Online Marketplace, published by Writer's Digest Books.

- A poster from Ad Astra 2001, when both Urban Tapestry and Robert Sawyer (the author guest at FKO) were both guests.

- One-of-a-kind blue totebag with a hand-drawn Urban Tapestry cartoon by me.

Hope to see some of you at FilKONtario this weekend!

Jamming with Richard Hatch

Watched the end of the Battlestar Galactica series the other day. For fear of spoilers, I've decided not to talk about this except to say that I thought it was very cool how they wove in a bit of the original musical motif of the original series.

Photo above: Jamming with Richard Hatch (who played a good guy in the original series and a bad guy in the new series) and Davroz at Marcon some years ago. Thanks to Gary Ehrlich for the photo.

One week until FilKONtario!

Above: a quickie photo I took on my iPhone during Urban Tapestry practice last night. Only a week left until FilKONtario. Our concert is currently scheduled for early Saturday afternoon.

Every time I get together with Allison and Jodi, I marvel at how lucky I am to be part of Urban Tapestry. We've been together for about 16 years now, and we still have just as much fun now as we did when we first got together. More fun, actually. :-)


We recently co-wrote a song based on Robert Sawyer's book, Flash Forward, and will be debuting it during our concert. It's the first serious song that all three of us worked on together (Jodi wrote most of the music), and I'm VERY happy with how it came out.

Robert Sawyer is one of the other guests at FilKONtario this year. We were guests with Robert back in 2001 at Ad Astra (see poster below, which we're adding to our Interfilk package). Robert is one of only seven writers in history — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world's top Science Fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.



And yay to Interfilk for sending Gerry and Sandy Tyra to FilKONtario this year! Also, many thanks to Gerry for his help in putting together our package for Interfilk this year, with a special Urban Tapestry CD not commercially available. More info on this soon.

As for the Guest Of Honour, if you haven't seen Heather Dale perform live, you NEED to come to FilKONtario:



I was recently on Second Life around St. Patrick's Day and was wandering around a Celtic theme area when, much to my delight, I discovered Heather's music playing full-blast during a virtual celebration(!).



You find out more about Heather and her music at Heatherdale.com, and hear samples on CDBaby. If you come to FKO, you also get a bonus: Heather's extremely talented music partner, Ben Deschamps.

Hoping to see some of you at FilKONtario. Allison, Jodi and I don't tend to perform as much in public as we used to; we all have so much going on in our lives. Anyway, it looks like our concert at FKO will be OUR ONLY PUBLIC PERFORMANCE IN 2009 and the only convention that all three of us will be attending this year. Our next mutual convention will be -next- year's FKO.

So please do come. It's going to be SOOOOOO much fun...

Counting down to FilKONtario...

Above: Urban Tapestry keychain figures, created by Michelle Bottorff and given to Allison, Jodi and me by Kathleen Sloan, who bought them in an Interfilk auction.

Less than two weeks until FilKONtario (April 3 - 5, 2009)! As I've mentioned before, the members of Urban Tapestry have been invited to be the Filk Waifs (Toastmasters) this year. Heather Dale is the Guest of Honour, sf author Robert Sawyer is the Special Guest, and Gerry & Sandy Tyra are the Interfilk Guests.



Allison, Jodi and I have co-written a song based on Flashforward, a book by Robert Sawyer, and we'll be debuting it in our concert. We're also participating in a Children's Concert as well as giving a workshop on how to build your confidence in filk.



I am absymally behind in e-mail right now. Because of various trips (all fun, of course) and a pulled jaw muscle (now recovering, happily), I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. I'll be posting more trip reports and photos when I have a chance.

Blippr and Blip.fm

Still catching up from my holiday, but had to post about Blip.fm. Jeff sent me an invite after seeing it mentioned on BSAG's journal (one of our favourite blogs). BSAG also got me hooked on Blippr; you can see my Blippr feed in the right-hand column of Blatherings, below my Twitterfeed.

Anyway, here's an experiment to see how to Embed feature in Blip.fm works. In theory, you should be able to listen to the song I last Blipped about (thanks to Ray for pointing me to Flight of the Conchords, by the way):



Here's how the song aired in the first Flight of The Conchords episode I saw: