If that doesn’t make for the perfect 24 hours, then I don’t know what does. Wednesday evening I sat on a panel for Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas discussing such questions as what gives a writer or scientist credibility? Do facts exist? What is the responsibility of a creative writer to the science he/she is responding to? Is plausibility enough? The poet Kelley Swain, who is also the Writer-in-Residence of Cambridge University’s Whipple Museum, moderated while I duked it out in front of a vocal and appreciative audience with Richard Barnett, Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow; Marek Kukula, the Royal Observatory Public Astronomer and Laura Dietz, novelist, science writer and lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University. Quite a stellar panel to be a part of. And if that wasn’t enough, Kelley even made up bookmarks with each of our names, photos and affiliations on it. I’m a bookmark! I had really been looking forward to this event and it didn’t disappoint — nor did the group dinner afterwards, where we continued the discussion with the help of a couple bottles of wine and, yes, brownies for dessert.

Then today, I spent the morning playing tourist in Cambridge, ambling in and out of the colleges. I even went punting on the Cam. It was a lovely way to spend a few hours and prepare myself for helping to lead a writing workshop with Kelley and Laura on finding the stories in science. This was held in the Whipple Museum which is a quirky and wonderful place dedicated to the history of science. Surrounded by old telescopes, models of  body parts, wooden models of the solar system, we spoke with new writers about turning science into fiction, finding inspiration in objects, tweaking out the story behind a concept.

All in all, a great trip to Cambridge, and I even sold a copy of Tangled Roots.