Celtic Music's Big Stage Shows

Three years ago I started a series of Celtic Music lenses on Squidoo. I concentrated on performers I was personally familiar with to begin with. Some are no longer recording, but their CDs are still available, others are recording and making a living, probably a modest one in many cases, from playing smaller venues like pubs, small halls and clubs. A few, like Enya, Loreena McKennitt and The Chieftains, are doing very well.

The sense I've gotten about these performers, from the obscure to the ones people who aren't necessarily Celtic music fans might have heard of, is that to start with they had a great love of the music and a joy in playing it. It comes through very clearly in their music. To me, the heart of Celtic music is in these people and they share that love with their audiences. They do it for the love and joy, with money only being a means to the end of sharing the music.

Over the years I've gotten a fair number of reader comments on my Celtic music lenses and even though I hadn't done lenses for them, Riverdance, Celtic Woman and Celtic Thunder got mentioned now and again. People mentioning them often said they hadn't heard much about Celtic music beyond those shows or maybe they knew of Enya, maybe Loreena McKennitt or The Chieftains, but not much else. They were finding out more through my lenses.

Since the big stage shows have influenced people to do a bit more exploring of Celtic music, it seemed only natural that I should create lenses about them. I was most familiar with Riverdance, having seen it on video and heard the music on CD. It's a spectacular show for the big stage, with extremely talented performers. And it grew out of the more modest Celtic music scene. Composer Bill Whelan was at one time a member of the Irish group Planxty and along with fellow Planxty member Donal Lunny, had put together a piece called "Timedance" as an interval act for the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest, hosted that year by Ireland. Out of that idea grew the interval act for the 1994 contest, again hosted by Ireland and that went on to become the Riverdance stage show. So I started with Celtic Music: Riverdance earlier this week.

Once I got that done, it seemed a good idea to quickly move on to Celtic Music: Celtic Woman, which I started late on Tuesday and finished on Wednesday. It took a bit longer than I thought it would because I included some solo albums by Celtic Woman performers in addition to the CDs and related DVDs by the group. I finished and published that by late afternoon.

Next I thought I'd get the Celtic Music: Celtic Thunder lens at least started, planning at the time to finish it up today. Instead I just kept going throughout the evening and published it.

Once I'd done all that, then I went to the Celtic Music: Lenses lens and added a new category, "Stage Shows" plus descriptions and links for the three lenses.

I probably should have then done this blog entry last night, but since publishing also means sending out Twitter tweets, Facebook entries and Squidcasts (notes to my Squidoo fans), by the time I got the Celtic Thunder lens published I was a bit tired of typing and was finding myself typing "Cletic" and "mucis" a lot more than usual.

Better Late Than Never

A couple of hours ago it occurred to me that a Squidoo lens called 10 Best Movies for Grownups might be improved considerably by adding movie trailers. I'm so used to writing lenses about books and I used the module design I use for books when I made the lens. But movies aren't books. Books don't have trailers. Movies do. So I added the ten trailers and published the lens, tweeted, put a note on Facebook and wrote a Squidcast, which is a note about a lens sent to fans on Squidoo. I just realized something when doing that - I have 300 fans.

So I was doing some other stuff when it occurred to me that there was this certain special event on the telly last night known as the Academy Awards show. Hmm, seemed like a good idea to go to the Academy Award site and see if any of the pictures, actors, actresses, etc. mentioned in my lens won anything.

Yep, The King's Speech won several Oscars, including Best Picture, and was nominated for several more. Several other films were winners and others were nominated. So I added mention of those wins and nominations to the lens and tweeted again, added a comment to my Facebook note and fired off another Squidcast. Normally I wouldn't do a second round like that, but the addition was significant, being the Oscars and all.

New Video for Music at Matt Molloy's

Just after my last post I noticed I had a new comment on my Squidoo lens Celtic Music: Music at Matt Molloy's. In the course of checking it out, I discovered the session video I'd originally included had gone missing. That happens with YouTube videos and the older a lens gets, the more likely it is to have a missing video.

Fortunately I was able to find a new one from a session at the pub recorded on 6 September 2010, which tells us the sessions are alive and well nearly 20 years after the CD was recorded.

The new video's pretty decent and worth dropping by the lens for a look and listen. You might want to get yourself a Guinness first, though.

Fiction Best Sellers Updated

I've updated the Squidoo lens Fiction Best Sellers to reflect sales for the week ending February 19. I also added links to Amazon.com's top 100 best sellers in Literature and Fiction and a couple of Kindle top 100 best sellers, one for paid ebooks and one for free ebooks.

This version of the list is easier to update than the one I did in 2008 and 2009 when I included covers and blurbs for the top 15 books. Now I'm just doing that for the top 10 and only one had to be changed this week. The listing of books 11 to 35 is also pretty easy since I just have to look up the book on Amazon, create the text link, paste it in and add the author's name. This week was easier than last week since I only had to look up books that weren't on the llist last week. I think there were only three or four I had to add.

I'm hoping folks will not only look at the lens to get ideas but actually click on the lens' links to buy the books from Amazon.com so I get commission on the sales. It's not much, but it adds up.

By the way, Water for Elephants is #4 this week, up from #7.

10 Best Movies for Grownups

My latest Squidoo lens is 10 Best Movies for Grownups. It was inspired by an article in AARP The Magazine, which has been giving out awards for grownup movies for ten years. In addition to naming the 10 best movies, the magazine also gives awards in other categories such as best actor and actress, best director, screenwriter, best foreign film and several other categories. The lens lists these awards and the seven additional movies related to them. Many of these movies from AARP's awards go on to win Academy Awards.

This new lens is outside of the subjects for which I've usually created lenses. I like Celtic music. I like it enough to have made 48 lenses about it. I like science fiction and have made 16 lenses about it (more, actually, but I combined six lenses about the Hugo Awards into one). I've got over a dozen lenses about authors outside science fiction, and several lenses about Faerieworlds and music associated with it.

The one thing about all of those subjects is that while they are great lens topics, they're not always something most people have heard about. Most people aren't familiar with Celtic musicians outside of perhaps Enya, Celtic Woman, Celtic Thunder or Riverdance. Most people tend to think of science fiction in terms of movies or television shows instead of books. Even when people do think of books, they're likely to see the science fiction/fantasy section of bookstores crowded with sword-and-sorcery, monster and vampire fantasy. Much of the actual science fiction is often dominated by Star Trek and Star Wars books.

So this new lens, along with my next-to-newest lens, Fiction Best Sellers, is an attempt to attract some traffic for subjects that might have broader appeal. I am interested in these new subjects, otherwise I wouldn't do lenses about them.

"How to See Faeries" - New Brian Froud Book

Brian Froud has teamed up with New York Times best-selling author John Matthews in How to See Faeries, an interactive guide to those in search of the dwellers in the land of the Fae.

Brian Froud is well known for his many books on faeries, beginning with the classic Faeries with Alan Lee, first published in 1978. He was also the conceptual designer for the Jim Henson movies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. His art inspired the annual celebrations Faerieworlds in Eugene, Oregon and FaerieCon in Baltimore, Maryland.

The new book will be available on Amazon.com on April 1, 2011 and is available for pre-order before that date.

I hope you'll consider ordering the new book either from this blog or from my Squidoo lens about Brian Froud. I also have created a lens for his wife, Wendy Froud and for Faerieworlds, the annual summer celebration in Eugene, Oregon where the Frouds appear each year. The festival was inspired by the art of Brian Froud.

How to Write a Check - My #1 Lens

My Squidoo lens How to Write a Check is by far my most visited lens. I have 120 lenses and that one lens often accounts for about half of the visits to all my lenses.

Generally I'm more interested in doing lenses about Celtic music, science fiction or humor. I never would have considered doing one about writing checks except that back in July 2008 when I made the lens, I was a new Giant Squid (50 lenses considered to be quality lenses by those who determine who gets to be a Giant). I'd signed up to follow a blog by Seth Godin, Squidoo's founder. One of the things he did was toss out a whole bunch of lens ideas and asked subscribers to pick at least one for a lens. Somehow the one about writing checks appealed to me, so I did some research and published the lens on July 30, 2008.

For quite a while it didn't attract a whole lot of attention, but I noticed around January 2009 that the number of visits began to increase. They've climbed pretty steadily since then and last month there were 5,000 visits. Squidoo counts unique visitors, so if someone goes back to the lens the same week, it doesn't count.

It was all a bit surprising because I'm not that great about promoting my lenses, something I'm trying to change. Over time I've tweaked the lens a bit and tried adding related products. Since it get so many visits, I've also added links to my other lenses.