Keeping the editing momentum going

Not much in the way of raw word count reduction tonight, but I did make it through roughly six pages, and I am in the final third of Chapter 19 now. The best thing about this effort, I think, is finding one actual typo: a redundant use of a word in a sentence. And I found a couple other places where I used the same descriptive label twice too close together.

But that’s about all I had time for tonight since tonight also involved Irish session goodness! And it’s just after midnight now, and I have to go to bed.

Edited tonight: -138
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,586
Lament of the Dove revised total (fifth draft): 105,554

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

My very first Irish session!

It’s been a while since I’ve done a decent Jam Report around here, so I will now make up for it with a new twist on that: a Session Report!

Last night my beloved solarbird and I had the distinct pleasure of sitting in with our very first Irish session. For those of you not familiar with those, they’re events where musicians gather together to hang out and play traditional Irish music. Last night’s was one starting up for the very first time at a pub called A Terrible Beauty in Renton! Dara found out about it courtesy of someone I believe she said she’d met at the Highland Games a few months back, and Dara relayed it to me.

Since I do of course have a ton of Irish music on my iPhone, I’ve known about the custom for some time; it gets mentioned a lot in lyrics, of course. And you hear about it when you are a fan of the appropriate genre of musicians. But I’d never been to one and so when Dara told me about this one, I leapt at the chance for us to go.

Several of you who follow my blog in whatever form will be familiar with filk circles. A session is kind of like that–but not quite, at least in comparison to the filk circles and housefilks I’ve attended. The main difference, aside from the obvious focus on traditional Irish music, is that the filks I’m used to are situations where one person plays one thing, and then another person takes a turn, etc. At filks, you may or may not get people playing along with the primary performer, depending on how strict a bardic circle you’re conducting. At this session, though, everybody was playing, and focusing on the melody being played in particular.

We had an excellent balance of instruments as well, which helped. As Dara and I were a) new to sessions in general, b) new to these folks in particular, and c) the only ones with rhythm instruments being regularly played (Annie, Dara’s friend, also had a guitar but primarily focused on her fiddle), we hung out over on the side of the group trying to follow along and play accompanying chords. Everyone else drove the melodies, trading off between their instruments. It was very neat to watch and I was very impressed that these folks were all very clearly comfortable with several instruments between them.

Dara, being more heavily practiced the last couple years than I am of course, got fancier with her strumming than I did. Me, I was working very, very hard on trying to pick out the keys of several unfamiliar melodies–just to try to improve my ear. I counted it a victory when I realized a few bars in on one melody that OH HEY THAT’S IN A! But I did also have the quiet satisfaction of figuring out unfamiliar (to me) ways to strum, to try to support the melodies being played. That was a fun learning experience and I want to do more of that.

Also, not ALL of the melodies were unfamiliar. Several of them tugged at my memory just because, these being Irish trad tunes of course, I KNOW I’ve heard a lot of them as part and parcel of the dozen or so albums I have with this material all over them. I just don’t know a lot of the specific tunes by name yet. But I DID very specifically recognize “Si Bheag Si Mhor” and “Road to Lisdoonvarna”–the latter, specifically, because cflute is a big fan of that one and likes playing it at Jam. :D

I must give props to Annie for a few things. One, I noticed she had a Luna guitar, a lovely green one, and my fellow Drollerie author Heather Ingemar had been plugging those guitars to me before I bought the General. Two, Annie is a fellow GBS fan and it is always, ALWAYS a pleasure to meet another person who loves the B’ys. Three, I was sheepishly relieved that while she was the other guitarist present, she spent most of her time giving love to her fiddle, so I didn’t feel entirely dorky back there playing rhythm on the General. ;D

Props must also be given to Matt, the guy who was hosting the session. Dude can play, and he traded off adroitly between his own fiddle, an Irish flute (I am STILL coveting an Irish flute despite the dozen+ flutes I already own), and a very cool-looking harp decked out in Christmas lights which did wonderful things for lighting him up while pictures were being taken of us. I am very grateful to him for letting Dara and me sit in, and in particular for encouraging us to try to join in more by playing stuff we know.

We admitted that we know more things with vocals than without–in the parlance of a session, that means we know songs rather than tunes. So Dara nudged me in to do “Lukey”! I capoed up 2 so I could get it into a key I could credibly sing, and scooted over to sit on the floor in the middle of the circle so the others could see my changes if they wanted to follow along. And I tried to describe the arrangement I knew before I started playing, hoping to give enough data that if anybody wanted to improv something, they could! That didn’t happen but I strongly suspect that was just a function of the others not knowing the song as I was playing it per se–and even given that, they all followed along very solidly.

There is something heady and magical about whipping out a fairly solid performance of a song with people you have never played with before in your life. Not to mention HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS, I have played AND SUNG “Lukey” in an actual Irish pub. In front of COMPLETE AND TOTAL STRANGERS. *^_^*;; I hope I did my B’ys proud. <3

And I totally want to do this again, in no small part because it'll give me an excuse to play my instruments more often. I say instruments because the opportunity to swap out between the General and my long and sadly neglected zouk and octave mandolin, not to mention my flutes, is too shiny to resist!

And oh yeah, it must also be said that A Terrible Beauty is a lovely place, and the food Dara and I ordered was nommable. And served us by a guy who from the sound of him was either Irish or doing a damn good impression of it. ;)

Last but not least, I must plug the photos taken of all of us musicians by one Liz Jackson, a very nice lady who clearly knows the business end of a camera. And the crowning pic of her collection would be this one right here! Please go over and give her some comment love, people!

Thank you Matt and Annie and Liz and everyone else for welcoming us, and I hope we can play with you all some more!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Tired tonight

But I did throw about 200 words into Chapter 2 of Mirror’s Gate, and therefore have done something writing-related! Thus, I can go to bed with a clear conscience.

Thanks by the way to everybody who has made such encouraging comments about the appearance of Oscar on my character radar! Props to sticckler in particular for finding me fiction that stars tuba-playing protagonists (although I note that in all cases, they’re all general fiction and not fantasy, mystery, or romance, so I’d be REAL interested to see if anybody could find me genre novels that fit the bill). She’ll be getting that copy of Faerie Blood I promised!

And I’ve already watched a few of the YouTube video links kathrynt and wrog provided, just to get a feel of how classical tuba music should sound. Some good stuff there, and it begins to give me an idea of what I want Oscar’s own music to sound like, but I need to listen to more. I’ve found an album called “British Tuba Concertos” on iTunes, which includes the Vaughn one in F minor, and I do believe I’ll be buying that; there’s a really nice-sounding Gregson on here too if the preview I’m listening to is any indication. I hear some nice smooth playing here.

It’ll be a while yet before Oscar gets an actual story, I think; I am still mulling that. I can add though that this boy has absolutely no magical talent inherent to himself whatsoever. He’s bog-standard human, and as previously mentioned, his music is his one awesome skill. Now, in the usual Instrumental Duel With the Fey type of story, the mortal always wins the day because the music of humanity is supposed to be Just as Awesome as Magic–but I don’t think I’ll quite play it that way, since that’s the Expected Way, and the whole point of this is to screw around with the trope.

But it’s all good. I’ll listen to the music and let myself randomly brainstorm and see what it tells me! Woo, buying iTunes music in the name of character research!

And ha. I need a suitable tuba playing icon for posts about Oscar, I think!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.