Janis Ian Again

I enjoy the statistics section of my weblog (hey, I am a former statistician!).  It shows not only how many times the weblog pages have been viewed, but also other websites that people have traveled to my weblog from, and also searches which turned up my weblog.  The people looking for "Moomin soundtracks" don't get much help from my blog, and neither do the people looking for the lyrics to "Until" by Sting  - two common searches.  And, around the holidays, there were a number of people looking for a Moravian Sugar Cake recipe. 

It's also fun to look at other things that they got from their searches.  One person, looking up Steve Martin and Roxanne, turned up a very interesting  (and long) biography of Steve Martin. 

But the most interesting thing I've found through these Google searches this week has been a Locus online article about Janis Ian (whom I wrote about in  "Play Like a Girl" - Janis Ian) and her foray into science fiction:

A lifelong SF fan, Ian made her editorial debut with Stars in 2003, an anthology co-edited with Mike Resnick, featuring stories based on Ian's songs. She has published several SF stories since 2003, beginning with "Prayerville" in Women Writing Science Fiction as Men.

The article is mostly an excerpt from an interview with her - her opinions about writing, either music or science fiction, her interactions with sci fi authors  (including Orson Scott Card and Anne McCaffrey), and their influences on her music.  It's worth a read if you like either Janis Ian or science fiction. 

“I think of science fiction as the prose equivalent of jazz: they're both outsider forms, they both stand on the legacy of that which went before, and they both tend to cultivate an audience that is much more knowledgeable about the form than the regular pop or folk audience has to be. Even the most esoteric folk song can pretty much be enjoyed just for its melody and its beat, and the same for rock, whereas with science fiction the more you know the more you enjoy what you're reading."
Janis Ian

I'll be ordering the book.