Oh god,
I won.
2016 Pegasus award, Best Filk Song: "
Creatures of Dream."
I ... have a lot I want to say about this song and this honor, but there's one thing I really should have said upon acceptance, and that's gotta come first. "Creatures of Dream" wouldn't exist without
Jesse Dangerously, who introduced me to nerdcore and told me that there was no reason I couldn't write rap and said super nice things about the first lyrics I sent him, and cobbled together the original beat for this song in a cave out of a box of scraps. (Said scraps including Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer's "
Shadows of Evangeline", and voice samples from the late greats
Jim Henson and
Gene Wilder.)
The other really important thing is what I
did say on acceptance, and that's that if you don't usually like rap but you like this song, then I
guarantee you:
there is other rap you will like. And over the next week or so, hopefully with Jesse's help, I will be putting together a long list of tracks and artists you should check out, because without all of these other brilliant lyricists and rappers I couldn't have written anything like this.
And, well ... I also couldn't have written it, or had any faintest notion of performing it for anyone, if it weren't for the filk community. Because this song is quite possibly the most viscerally autobiographical thing I've ever done -- and I knew, the whole time I was writing it, that there were people who would listen to it because in filk we listen to everybody, and who would both sympathize and understand. That these things I was saying, that were fundamentally true about me, were also fundamentally true about a lot of you too. You know where I've been, because you've been where I am.
(As evidenced by the fact that "Creatures of Dream" and one of the other nominees this year, Vixy and Tony's "
We Are Who We Are", are basically twins.) (-- and while I'm on that subject, can I just say? There was not a single song in the category this year that I would not have been proud to lose to. Such a great, great ballot this year, you guys; I fully intend to nominate all of these songs again until they win.)
I'm still a little overwhelmed and I don't see that passing anytime soon. To the filk community:
thank you. Thank you all so much.
If anybody would cross-post or link to this on Facebook, wherever filk people will see it, I would be most grateful.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}