More Randomness and a promo op.

So, after the excitement of Saturday I got steadily sicker, until by Wednesday it took me the whole day to write 700 words. On Thursday I gave up and awarded myself a sick day, which I spent reading blogs.

As a result of Chuck Wendig’s “promote yourself” post I added a whole load of new blogs to my friend list, which is good. But this morning I find the RSS feed thingy has given me all their recent posts in one huge slab of ‘OMG, my FL is broken!’ I hope that will settle down from now on or some of them will have to go again. I don’t mind reading one post of a particular blog a day, but I can’t cope with five.)

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As if the prospect of learning the 5000 tunes in my handwritten, photocopied stack of ‘essential music for morris musicians’ sheet music on the whistle wasn’t enough, I seem to have decided to take up the pipe and tabor. This is the original morris one man band – a three hole pipe that you play in one hand, while you simultaneously play a drumbeat with the other hand, like so:

This makes the overblowing you do on the whistle to get the second octave seem like child’s play. To get a single octave on the tabor pipe you have to overblow once and twice, and to get the higher octave, three and four times. (What am I talking about? See here: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Pipe_and_tabor)

I can feel my brain protesting, but I can at least play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with drum accompaniment, and almost play the morris tune “Balance the Straw” with rhythm. I’m fairly sure that this time next week I could do a good job of “Balance the Straw,” if I practiced it every day between then and now. Maybe that’s what I’ll do.

Mustn’t stop practicing the whistle too, though, or this will just end up destroying the progress I’ve made on that.

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What is this ‘promo op’ of which you speak? Well, I thought it was a really good idea of Chuck Wendig’s to throw open the comments section of his blog to people who wanted to promote their book/blog/vid/editing/dogwalking service/any other thing. So naturally I thought it would be a good idea to do it here too.

Basically, if you have a new book out, or any other thing you want to shout about, leave a comment here. I don’t guarantee I’ll reply to them all, but I’ll see them all and so will anyone else who comes here. And it can’t hurt, right? 🙂