Wag and the King ...

... THE MOVIE! Click here. (Remember to have your sound on!)

P.S. I'm also on ABBA this week.
P.P.S. The guitar player has sworn me to secrecy, but the dog sounds are from www.partnersinrhyme.com - thank you!

If You Like X, You'll Love Y

One of the reasons I love singing in a choir is that it is so completely NOT like writing. When I write I am totally responsible. The story won't be told if I don't tell it. The characters won't have a chance to grow and breathe and spread their surprising and unlikely wings if I don't spend the time - and heart's blood - to give it to them. And don't even get me started on my campaign to bring the ferret to the attention of the reading public.

But singing in a fine, big choir ... that's something else again.

I don't have any illusions about me as a soloist - I make reliable musical cannon fodder and that's my limit. And that suits me fine. I love the way it feels being part of the sound. I love the way it feels when the conductor brings us all together, voices and instruments. I love coming to know the music from the inside - how it's put together - the structure - by learning one thread of it as well as I can. All the other threads are somebody else's problem.

Fabulous.

So here's the plug - Dundee Choral Union, Sunday night 7:30 at the Caird Hall - come and hear what we make of the Brahms' Requiem and some terrifyingly unaccompanied Barber, Bruckner and Taverner. I'm at the end of the row, singing my socks off and, for once, not thinking about writing at all.

Cheers, Joan.

High-Tech Gadgets That Detect Magic

Google Alert has come through with flying colours yet again - another of those things I would never have stumbled on by myself has dropped into my Inbox this morning. The site is called "High-Tech Gadgets That Detect Magic" and there, in amongst Ghostbusters, Star Trek and Sabrina the Teenage Witch is ... Questors!

The Dragon Detector from Questors by Joan Lennon. In Lennon's fantasy novel, our hero Bryn has a gadget called a "dragon detector" which gives off an awful noise when the dragon Dagrod comes near it. As Bryn explains to Dagrod, "Apparently you give off a sort of radiation, and if I wanted to know if you were around, or coming closer, or something, this would tell me..."

I love it! Not perhaps for the deathless prose being quoted, but look at the company I'm in!

There you go - a day that looked like it was going to be just another post-school-event headache fest has just got a whole lot better - thank you Google Alert and the fine folk who made the Gadget site!

Cheers, Joan.