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February 12, 2017

Rex Jameson
Genre Writing Workshop: The Art of the Character Study
1:00 – 3:00 pm
In this workshop, we will discuss the creation of character studies and their incorporation into a storytelling narrative. Participants will learn the relationship between show and tell in character building, the importance of genre and perspective, and the art of moving plot forward while also developing interesting protagonists and antagonists.

Rex Jameson is the author of two novels Lucifer’s Odyssey and The Goblin Rebellion and half a dozen short stories. An avid history buff and an unabashed nerd with an appetite for science fiction and fantasy, he loves to create complex speculative fiction with layered characters. He earned a PhD in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University and researches distributed artificial intelligence in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Rex and his wife Jenny live in Pittsburgh where they enjoy hosting family and friends. Workshop will be in the Danforth Lounge, 2nd Floor of the Cohon University Center, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15213.

Mary Robinette Kowal
Photo by © 2012 Rod Searcey

Mary Robinette Kowal
The Intersection of Puppetry and Science Fiction
4:00 pm
These two arts have a surprising amount in common. In this talk, award-winning author and professional puppeteer Mary Robinette Kowal looks at how puppetry has shaped her creatively, and the tools that working writers can borrow from stage.

Mary is a three-time Hugo Award winning author of The Glamourist Histories fantasy novels. The talk will be in Room 1112, Doherty Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15213; no registration, lecture is free.

Book Signing
Mary Robinette Kowal and Rex Jameson
5:00 pm
Room 1112, Doherty Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15213. Open to the public.

 

Sad news — Kira passed away

kira-rainbowWe are extremely sorry to let everyone know that beloved Parsec member and past president, Kira Heston, passed away a short time ago today. We’re going to miss you, Kira. Check back for info on a memorial service.

Parsec Picnic this Saturday!

The Parsec Picnic will be this Saturday, August 27, 2016, from 12 noon to dusk at the Dormont Park large pavilion.

The park is located between Memorial Dr, Annapolis Ave, Dormont Ave, and McFarland Road. To find the pavilion, park in the lot off Annapolis Ave, and walk on the paved path next to it to the pavilion. The zip code is 15216.

Make your own alien at Confluence

Sample alien
Sample alien

Create your very own alien to bake at the workshop and take home!

We will cover polymer clay basics and how to bake your creations. You will get 4-5 1oz chunks of various colors, a bottle of aloe gel (to clean your hands) and a write up about polymer clay. Limit of 12 people. Material costs: $7.

Sign up at Registration or just stop by the workshop to see if we have room. Watching is free. (Workshop will be held in the same room as the Art Show, Ballroom 2.)

Costuming at Confluence

Confluence (July 29-31 at the Sheraton Pittsburgh Airport Hotel)

Costuming

We haven’t had a formal masquerade in a good while, but this year we plan to give out ribbons and prizes for hall costumes, including a signed copy of Mary Soon Lee’s CROWNED to the “most heroic costume” and special guest Lawrence M. Schoen will use YOUR NAME as a character name in his next novel for a “really, really” good costume based on the sentient animal characters of BARSK.

Confluence Program

Program Update for Confluence (July 29-31 at the Sheraton Pittsburgh Airport Hotel)

Program

Principal theme this year: heroic fantasy (our Guest of Honor is fantasy author Saladin Ahmed). But we will also have lots of SF, science, horror, and writing panels, and special guest Lawrence M. Schoen will be talking about both the Klingon language and the sentient elements of his Nebula nominated novel, BARSK. We have an outstanding filk track, and this year many of our filk guests will also be appearing on panels and in workshops.

If you’d like to take part in the Confluence Writing Workshop (July 30, Saturday morning), send a short story or part of a larger word (up to 3,000 words) to conprogram@parsec-sff.org BY JULY 15 and then come to Confluence to go over it and improve it with the help of a brace of professional writers and editors.

Saturday will also be David Hartwell Tie Day: wear your gaudiest tie in honor of a friend, dealer, panelist and editor who was a Confluence regular until his recent untimely death.

On Saturday evening, Steel City Improv Theater will present USS IMPROVISE at 8 PM – it looks like it will be a lot of fun.

And of course, panels, workshops, readings, art show, dealer’s room, autographing sessions, kaffeeklatsches and literary beers, plus a couple of book launches and the camaraderie of our con suite.

 

Confluence News

Pittsburgh’s annual literary science fiction / fantasy / horror convention, Confluence, is coming up on July 29-31 at the Sheraton Pittsburgh Airport Hotel, 1160 Thorn Run Road. Coraopolis, PA 15108.

Registration

Online registration is available through July 22. Mail-in deadline is July 11. If you pre-register, you will save $10 on a full-weekend adult membership. There is also a $5 discount for paid-up members of PARSEC.

Alpha Book Signing July 27

The Alpha book signing will be on Wednesday, July 27 from 7 to 9 pm. Authors involved: David Barr Kirtley, Karina Sumner-Smith, Tamora Pierce, Seth Dickinson and Amal El-Mohtar.

Location: The Greensburg Barnes & Noble is at 5155 Route 30, Greensburg, PA 15601 (724-832-0622).

Dagnab that flibbertigibbet

by Joe Coluccio

Gort_Klaatu_KlingonLanguage lives and is far too vital to be ossified in a graveyard of grammar books, the commercial guidelines of publishing house editors, or in the strictures of those who claim to hold our key to linguistic structure.

If it isn’t obvious by now, I will point out that my tack is toward descriptive, not predictive language. Grammar and word usage should not be something akin to a literal interpretation of the Bible. All rules passed from on high applied by tightening fingers around your stiff starched collar.

On the other hand (four fingers and a thumb, a friend of mine would say every time he was faced with a dilemma) I dislike common parlance and works of fiction that insist on peppering speech, prose, or script with the topical phrases, mostly gathered from popular movies and television, which rise then fall with the depressing regularity of a row of rotating sheet metal ducks at a busy bee bee gun gallery. It’s kinda like using a cellophane wrapped greeting card to express your emotion. I guess you could say that I dislike it big time, bro.

I believe that one of the important concepts of writing and reading is novelty. I’m not sure what I make of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but I love the fact the end of the Wake, “A way a lone a last a loved a” wraps back around to the beginning sentence “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…” Ouroboros. Eternal Return. World Without End, Amen. I like the fact that the very words of the story carry as much meaning as the story structure. And many thanks to Murray Gell-Mann who discovered quarks then drove the name from Joyce’s elementary text into the sea of our language. “Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark. And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.” Strange and Charmed. It is all great fun. Great fun is important. Maybe more important than you think.

Science fiction, full of neologism and wacky meme, from its pulp roots, seems the best place to find novelty. Darko Suvin, who would most likely disagree with everything I think about the importance of the pulp origins of SF, describes the field by what he calls “cognitive estrangement” the presence of a “novum,” a novel device, that leads us to conceive our world in a different way.

“Ninety percent of everything is crap,’ observed Theodore Sturgeon. Ninety percent of crap may reveal everything of value. It’s a grand feeling to throw off the pristine uniform and wallow in the muck.