It’s filking time!

Gotta a call last week from the local filk group. They’re having a get-together tomorrow and Patty and Mike Briggs are coming up for it. Patty suggested they call me, and, well, here we are, looking forward to the get together, tho with no small trepidation, considering we haven’t done this seriously in, oh, fifteen years!

Filking, for those who don’t know, is SF/F folk music, i.e. music written by and for SF/F folk about subjects, be it books, movies or spaceflight, that are of interest to us. For decades now  filkers have come together at conventions and home gatherings to share gossip and music. It’s a fun community within a community which has gained increasingly public acknowledgment in recent years. I understand there’s even a filk radio station somewhere.

The work “filk” allegedly comes from a typo in a program book back in the stone age of conventions. Whether or not that’s true or whether some clever fan or pro came up with the term, it’s stuck and filkers wear it proudly.

Filk isn’t the reason Carolyn and I got together back when…that was her work and my wild notion of doing a graphic novel adaptation. But once we met, Carolyn, who was heavily into filk at the time, introduced me to it, and it certainly became part of the glue that holds us together.

I’ll never have the voice my mom and sis had and has, I’ll never be more than an average amateur (and now PPA) with the guitar, but it’s brought me many hours of enjoyment over the years, and I’m looking forward to getting back into it.

We’d already begun to drift away from it when we were in OKC. We moved the guitars with us, but apartment life was not at all conducive to practice. Then, we met Patty and Mike, and they were into filking and we sort of brushed back into it, briefly dusted off the guitars, then kinda drifted away again, because of those too-close quarters of an apartment. Once we moved into the house, we hoped to turn the basement into a filking area, but we’ve just not had it at a top priority. Now, with this little event looming, we’ve dusted off the quitars, restrung, and am desperately trying (in two days) to reconstitute calluses and break in the nylon strings (on my classical baby. Carolyn’s 12 string beast is doing just fine).

Hence, the Band-Aids. And the WD-40? My vocal chords are beyond rusty and all the way over to frozen solid.

Wish us luck!