I do talk sometimes
posted 10 August 06 by J.S. Vodalarius
Been a while, en’t it. Many apologies for the long hiatus, although I’m not sure if there are enough people reading this to be offended by my lengthy silence.
Anyway, updates on my life. At some point in June I got a job at the Toadstool, our local bookstore. I work four days a week and spend a lot of that time unpacking boxes. Also I get to indulge my compulsive-straightener neurosis by going along shelves, fixing the book line-ups. It’s heavenly. I love my job.
Early July I went to a reunion with the family. The next week, on the eighteenth, I got in the car with my mom and we made the two-day drive down to Greensburg, PA, stopping at my grandparents’ house overnight on the way. In Greensburg I got dropped off at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg campus, where I spent a week and a half at the Alpha Workshop for Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror. That, as you may have guessed, is a writing workshop. It’s for young students, fourteen to nineteen years old, and it’s awesome. I made a lot of friends, I had fun, and I got to meet Theodora Goss, Timothy Zahn, Wen Spencer, and Tamora Pierce. Tamora Pierce was why I got all excited about the workshop in the first place, since I love her books. And she’s awfully nice. They all are.
During the course of the workshop there was a lot of writing going on, the entire Firefly television show got watched courtesy of my DVDs, and there were three trips to Barnes & Noble for readings by the students and readings and signings by the authors. At the end of the workshop we all piled into a bus and went to Confluence, the Pittsburgh literary science fiction convention. As a consequence of this I have a duffel bag full of books and a lot of people to inflict my writing on in the name of concrit. Squee!
So Alpha is awesome and people should apply. And I’m having mostly a good summer.