St. Patrick’s Day 2014

To be very honest, St. Patrick’s Day makes me a little twitchy.  Everyone wears green, talks about leprechauns, and eats corned beef and cabbage.  Yuck. I would hide from all of it if it weren’t for one thing. It’s our performing season! And I love performing more than anything else. So, yes, there is definitely a love-hate relationship here, but who cares, it’s time to share some pictures of our dancing adventures.

Aranmore dancers and float

At the Ft. Lauderdale parade we won an award for Best Commercial Participation. We had dancers performing hard shoe on the float and dancers on the ground, dancing their reels and skipping.  After the parade we dashed over to the Ft Lauderdale festival to dance and then it was off to the West Palm fest.

 

 

West Palm Irish Festival

Next we toured Delray Beach where we danced at their Siamsa festival. Between performances, a band called us out in front of them and we danced a super fast light jig in the grass (the band was MacTalla Mor and they were really nice plus their music was awesome). At the Delray parade the next day we won an award for Outstanding Irish Performance or Display.  After that, I can’t even tell you what we did, it was a whirl of shows and most of the time we had to dance and dash to be on time for our next show. The St. Patrick’s Day season is insane, barely controlled chaos that leaves you exhausted at the end of the day, but if it came twice a year I would be a happy dancer.

Bedner’s Farm Fresh Market

 

Delray Siamsa, Photo credits to Jennifer Saikley Miller-Raeth

Tim Finnegan’s Irish Pub

Ceili and Queries

After a week and a half of revamping my query, I’m ready to send it out once more. While I was working on it, I realized that queries would actually be fun to write if all your hopes and dreams didn’t rest on them. 

Last night my friend and I attended a Ceili, which, if you are not familiar with the word, is a party with Ceili dancing (Irish couple dances) and Irish music. We were representing our dance school so we opened the dancing with our reel solos and then danced the four hand reel with a lovely couple who happened to know the dance.

     The Ceili featured the fiddler Eamon Coyne, he provided the music for us. It’s always fun to collaborate with a live musician and his music was great to dance to. No pictures from the event, but I intend to post a review of our St. Patrick’s day performance season next.

Yet another blog infiltrates the internet.

So, this is the obligatory ‘hello’ post.
Hello.

Right, now that that’s done with let’s get this out there: I am a reluctant blogger.  More than anything in the world, I want to be a published author. Apparently this means I must have a ‘web presence’. This is the part where I point out that Jane Austin and Shakespeare did not have blogs. Yes, I know, changing times and all that, but still.  However, since all agents seem to agree that a blog is vital, here I am. If it must be done, then I shall do it properly. With minimum griping, I swear.

To start off, here are five facts so you may get to know me.

1: I am a performing Irish Dancer, fresh (and exhausted) from the 2014 St Patrick’s Day season.

2: I’m a self-taught seamstress, I’ve done a few commissions but mostly I sew for my dance school and myself, I love sewing historical and fantasy costumes.

3: I wrote my first novel when I was twelve. 210 glorious pages of clichés, undeveloped characters, and terrible writing. Obviously that manuscript will never see the light of day, but that’s where it all started.

4: I love weapons. I own (and shoot) two beautiful longbows, more swords and knives then I can count, and various other destructive things. Come at me zombie apocalypse, I’m ready.

5: I’m a major history geek. Particularly English history, it’s so delightfully bloody. Naturally, this crosses over to my sewing and I will often lose myself for hours looking at/researching historical gowns and millinery.

So, now we’re all acquainted, thanks for reading and hope you come back for more.