Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

My first thought is that you need the introduction to be an interesting and/or amusing part of the stage patter, which means preparing one if you need it: "This isn't a song about Alice."

i read a fanfic recently in which characters from an anime show were playing D&D. the author felt the need to give a 500-word explanation of D&D up front, but it was completely unnecessary -- the story made enough sense to be enjoyable anyway.

since i don't hang around filkers (it's too painful, i have perfect pitch, man), i don't run into this in that area, but i do see a depressing number of authors succumbing to an urge to overexplain. even published books are often filled with pages of unnecessary exposition or awkward constructions that attempt to explain ideas that the reader's imagination should be entirely sufficient to cope with. it's worst, of course, in sci-fi and fantasy books, since they are by definition filled with concepts that are unfamiliar to the reader.

it makes me grind my teeth.

i'm a tech writer -- i explain things for a living. still, my philosophy when it comes to my job and to fiction is to keep the explanations to a minimum. if something needs enough explication that it requires a digression from the matter at hand, you can find a better way to handle it -- a glossary, a reference section, or, in the case of fiction, finding a way to work it into the storyline in a way that isn't distracting. (flashback scenes can work for this. one character can tell a story to another. but for the love of all that's holy, please never write anything like this:

"Dalforgen," said madbodger, referring to a randomly-generated word once produced by his Hashbaby program, which he and his intrepid roommate later decided would be a good word to mean "a word that doesn't exist."

dragging a reader out of a storyline to explain something that could be made clear from context instead, or wasting time in front of a story or a song to provide a backstory, is intrusive at best and tiresome at worst.

okay, that's my rant for the morning. now i have to go off and write more software documentation.

RARRR!!! YES!YES!YES!

I was just gonna post have had for a while on backlog a rant to just this point: TRUST YOUR MATERIAL, SHUT UP AND SING!

It's on my mind for several reasons -- Madcap Rumpus Soc. needed less (or a different sort of) MCing than they got, talky performers at NEFFA -- but really it was the big beautiful posters promoting Deborah Henson-Conant's show popping up around town. She's not this worst offender, but she's the most heart-breaking (for me) because she has sooooo much going for her musically, and she doesn't let herself use it at all, constantly upstaging the music. GRAAAARRRR!!

'General policy' instead of 'rule of thumb'. If you ever need alternate phrasing for something, I got Lots of practice creating euphemisms while dealing with the ~political types at the DOJ in DC.

And, yes, it IS a good general policy. Let the music speak for itself. If someone Really wants to know, they can ask when they come up to buy your CD!