It’s the Seneschal’s fault.

Okay, that’s probably obscure enough for a initial title. Technically it should read “It’s the SCA’s fault” but having seneschals be the scapegoat for everything is an old SCA tradition. The SCA is the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval reconstructionist group started 40+ years ago in Berkeley, CA. If you’ve seen weirdos in plate armor hitting each other with duct tape-wrapped sticks in your local park, that’s us.

So why is it their fault? Well I was at Gulf Wars a few weeks ago with 2000+ other SCAdians and I heard about the A & S 50 Challenge. The Society’s 50th anniversary is coming up in 2015 and an open Challenge was issued to do fifty Arts and Sciences projects to commemorate the occasion. Now my “persona” in the SCA is a minstrel (not a bard) and I hatched the foolish idea that I could write fifty new songs to commemorate the occasion.

There were a couple problems. Chief among them was the fact that I have a “weekend warrior” attitude toward the SCA, i.e. I usually only think about it during events on weekends. (Of course the fact that I’m a lazy slob probably doesn’t help either.) But I had a lot of time to think about the issue driving between Mississippi and Florida and it occurred to me that a blog could motivate me more often, especially if the stone a second bird could kill.

As I said, I’m a minstrel. I wander around at events and entertain people at their camps. I often get asked, “Do you have a CD?” To which I must reply, “Not yet.” (See the reference above to “lazy slob” and add the additional “cheap bastard.”) It occurred to me that I could post my songs on a website so that they would be available to interested parties. I am tentatively, and ambitiously, entitling that project “Song of the Week.”

Not a Bard