About Alyx Dellamonica

After twenty-two years in Vancouver, B.C., I've recently moved to Toronto Ontario, where I make my living writing science fiction and fantasy; I also review books and teach writing online at UCLA. I'm a legally married lesbian, a coffee snob, and I wake up at an appallingly early hour.

On the launch pad, with extra dental craziness

wpid-Photo-2012-05-05-1037-AM.jpgSo yesterday I bit into a perfectly benign piece of chocolate and then spat out two alarmingly large chunks of silver tooth filling. These had been wrapped around a razor-sharp edge of tooth in a way that made slicing my tongue open on the thing an inevitability.

With that exciting challenge added to my roster, Tuesday went like this:

Fiction-writing.
Teaching & e-mail.
Commute to massage therapy.
Race madly to mentoring gig without eating lunch, for fear of shattering the tooth.
Beg dentist to find room for me in the afternoon.
Mentoring gig! With a farewell visit from my favorite bosslady!
Quick, light-headed lunch at Rue 909, with a side of answering more e-mails.
Dentist. Where things were OMG, not nearly as dire as I feared. (And where my dentist of 17 years said some extremely sweet things. If you want a nice dentist, Doctor Liu at Broadway Dental rocks the planet!!)
Run home, change to yoga togs, do not pass Go, run directly to Yoga for 75 minutes.
Heat and eat the dinner K had already prepped and…

…are you ready?…

Then our real estate agent came over and we signed a no subjects deal on the condo. It is sold, sold, sold and we are handing over the keys on the 24th.

My brain is entirely made of porridge. And I have realized I have to shower. Later, gaters.

Painted Ladies, the Pinboard

painted ladiesI have stumbled over a couple terrific art boards lately and have begun gathering up portraits of women as a result.
Many of the women on my Painted Ladies pinboard may be familiar to you–a lot of them are celebrity paintings by celebrity painters. Others, though, are newer or more obscure.

It has been fascinating collecting these, and what I’ve realized is that there’s a real difference between a photographic portrait–even if it’s fanciful–and something painted from scratch. The element of imagination is different: the painter imbues their subject with personality in a way that seems less about capturing reality and more about creating or amplifying it.

(From this you can tell I am not versed at all in art criticism.)

What was most exciting, though, was to stumble over Kneeling Girl, by Thomas Saliot. This is as perfect a picture of the protagonist of my next novel, a woman named Sophie Opal Hansa, as I could ever have wished to discover.

Today’s moving-related discovery: Revenue Canada will let us write off a ton of our moving expenses this year.

Officially on the move…

A few of you already know this, but now I’m telling the world. Kelly has a job offer in beautiful, scenic Toronto and we are relocating there this spring.

More info to come! In the meantime, if we know you and you’re local, we’re getting rid of a lot of stuff, including books and our gorgeous (though cat-scratched) chaise lounge. (Also, actually, the apartment.) Let me know if you might want stuff.

The cats already know something is up, and are freaking out accordingly.
Rumble08

Saying goodbye to Joyce Summers on the #BuffyRewatch

slayerI didn’t get out of rewatching “The Body” and now I’m out to share the pain. The essay is live, and it comes with at least one bad pun.

I spent the weekend at FanExpo Vancouver, and met many wonderful fans; I also got to reconnect with a bunch of friends who made a point of ambling by Authors’ Alley while I was at the convention. It was my first time in the big room at Canada Place, the one whose roof is actually the sails. The light and air in there were wonderful. The floor, otoh, was very hard indeed and my ankle has been suffering as a result.

Speaking of events, if you are in Vancouver the launch for the Camille Alexa / Claude Lalumiere anthology Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories is tomorrow at the StormCrow Tavern. The details are on Alexa’s site, here and it would be great to see every last one of you.

FanExpo, FanExposure, FanExposed!

JULIETLANDAUI will be at FanExpo Vancouver this weekend, signing books and meeting fans. Including some of you, perhaps? I hope so.

Some of the other writers who will be in Authors Alley include my good friend DD Barant, author of the thoroughly awesome urban fantasy thrillers, The Bloodhound Files, Hiromi Goto, whose Half World won the Sunburst Award in the youth category in 2010, the same year Indigo Springs received the Sunburst for adult fiction–we’re like Sunburst Twins! Eileen Kerneghan and Silvia Moreno-Garcia will be there too.

And also there will be a few other people you might, possibly, have heard of: James Marsters, Juliet Landau, Amanda Tapping, and Sean Astin, for example, along with many others including what looks like the entire cast of Continuum.