Visprint's Sabado del Libro

Me with the attendees of Visprint's Sabado del Libro

What a fun way to spend a rainy Saturday.

In Sabado Del Libro, Visprint opens its offices on a Saturday afternoon to welcome readers and a featured Visprint writer to discuss a current or future book, and whatever else we might feel like discussing while having coffee.

Attendees to the July 7 session received an exclusive excerpt from my upcoming linked-stories science fiction collection Nightfall, and I also did a reading of the same excerpt.

Photo from Yan Baltazar, Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio and UST Writing Workshop Fellow, and one of the SDL attendees. Thanks, Yan!

What is Nightfall about?

Vanessa stumbles upon something unexpected in an apartment hundreds of floors above the ground: a dead body next to a single beeping monitor. In another part of the city, Criselda mulls preemptive violence after her Mod shuts down to show her a boy, a bird, a window. Is her Mod malfunctioning, or is she being manipulated? Set in a city of towers, where residents undergo biomodification in order to work more hours and earn more money, where living in the Upper Floors is the ultimate dream, Nightfall unfolds in a series of interconnected stories, exploring the lives of characters whose fates intersect and intertwine, revealing the paths they have taken to bring them to this dark night.

I was anxious and worried during the week leading to the meet-up. Can I possibly keep talking for (*looks at watch*) three hours??

But as it turns out, with enough coffee--yep. We had a fun discussion about science fiction, horror, world building, biomodification, culture, writing habits, the creative process, workshops, micro-aggressions, journeying through the international publishing landscape as a person of color and as a Filipino, race, gender, and embalming (ikr??).

Thank you to Visprint for making this happen. I had such a great time. (And based on messages I've been getting from some attendees, looks like they had a great time, too.)