My latest album, Beacons in the Darkness, is now available on Bandcamp. It’s a living-room album, and I make no great claims for my vocal abilities, so payment is optional. It’s the songs themselves which I think have some interest. The title track, a secular solstice song, is one of my best songs, and it’s on the album in both English and German. 
You can find my other albums, likewise on a payment-optional basis, at garymcgath.bandcamp.com.
The latest SMOF News (Volume 3, issue 30) discusses the post-pandemic decline of in-person fan-run science fiction conventions, with Outlantacon being the latest casualty. It’s a situation I’m familiar with, since I’ve negotiated hotel contracts for several filk conventions and more recently couldn’t find a suitable hotel at a reasonable cost for NEFilk. Two factors make up the problem: rising hotel costs and decreased attendance.
Fan-run cons have always worked on the periphery of more lucrative events, such as weddings and gatherings of large organizations. To get space, we have to find a weekend that the other customers don’t want or fill up the space that they aren’t using. COVID killed a lot of hotels, and the ones that are still around want to make up for a couple of years of lost revenue. This means fewer discount deals. If we paid rates comparable to the big customers, we’d have to charge a membership rate of a couple of hundred dollars for a weekend con.
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(Off-topic for this blog, but I want people to know about this album.)
There are filk albums that excite me with their stories, impress me with their musicianship and technical skill, or make me laugh at their humor. Not many, though, grab me from the inside the way Gray Rinehart’s “Taking You Out to See the Stars.” The songs touch on hope for the future, love, painful loss, facing adversity, mortality, and more. It’s billed as a “pre-order,” but don’t be fooled; it’s got thirteen fully-realized songs.
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If it’s a stretch to call a fan fiction novel on the Web a book, it’s only a slight one. More than a few people reading this will be interested to learn that Leslie Fish’s Star Trek fan novel Banned from Argo is now available for reading.
Warning: When you follow that link, you may be required to agree to massive terms-of-service and privacy policy documents before you’re allowed to read the novel. There are ways to get around them, the simplest being to turn off JavaScript. I’m positive that Leslie would approve.
If you’d like to support Leslie, see her Bandcamp page.
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