I had a single-day weekend this week, but I feel like I made the most of it. Paul and I went to the Sci-Fi Spectacular at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on Friday night. That was very cool–lots of great music and an appearance by George Takei.

Then, on Saturday I attended Parsec‘s YA Lecture Series and Workshop. Caroline Carlson presented a workshop called “Blueprints for Enchantment: Constructing a magical world for your fantasy novel” which was a lot of fun. I’m not really working on a fantasy novel at the moment, but it did make me want to.

After the workshop, Nalo Hopkinson gave a talk called “Keeping it (Un)Real” which focused on the validity of fantasy and science fiction in the face of so many real-world issues. It was a really interesting, well presented talk, and I’m very glad that I went.

This was the second of the four-part series that Parsec is presenting in partnership with CMU and and SFWA. That means that if you’re local to the Pittsburgh area and you missed it, you should make sure that you catch the next two!

In unrelated happy news, my story “Jigsaw Pieces” is available to read for free online!