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This was posted to a newsgroup for filksongs, some year ago

Newsgroup posting by Tom Holt

"I wanted to be the first kid in our street to filk Not The Way To Get Laid; but the #1 version was born weak and sickly, so I thought i'd abandon it on this hillside to die. Anybody wants to take it home and bring it up with the other wolfcubs, be my guest."

If you want your filksongs sung
But you're weak in heart or lung
Or your mouth's too small for your tongue,
I'll tell you the way to get played.
Don't write half an hour of ose;
Songs that scan and rhyme like prose;
Life's too short for more of those.
This is not the way to get played.
Don't heap 'stars' with gold or furs
Or fill their mugs with beer.
Filkers all are amateurs
Or else they wouldn't still be here.
Don't write dirty songs for men;
Don't write songs that sneer at fen;
Don't filk 'Kraken' yet again;
This is not the way to get played.
Don't filk books that no-one's read,
Books by authors long since dead,
Books you wrote inside your head;
This is not the way to get played.
If your song's too gross to sing,
(Not even for a bet)
That's one song you'd better sling,
Or post up on the Internet.
Don't waste spirit, time or wealth
Stalking pros with guile & stealth;
Sing the goddamn thing yourself -
That's the only way to get played.
(The #2 version, "Not the way to get paid", shows slightly more promise. But not much.)


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Book Cover of Here Comes the Sun

Quote from Here Comes the Sun

The girl curtseyed again and danced off down the hill, leaving Bjorn alone at last with the trees, the birds, the squirrels and his ingrowing toenail. For a while he stood and looked aimlessy about him, until his eye lit on one tree that he recognized. It was a tall, ancient oak and he remembered it well; he had climbed it as a boy, and his grandfather had often lifted him up into its branches, pointing out to him all the marvellous things he could see. How wonderful it is, his grandfather used to say, to sit in a high tree and look out over all kingdoms of the world, as if one were God's own eyes!
  Bjorn braced his feet, grinned, and set about cutting it down.
(Tom Holt, "Here Comes the Sun")
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All stories/filksongs is written by Tom Holt, and not by me.
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