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.

Writing well by doing violence, at @Tordotcom

stubby the rocket
Thumping Great Crimes is the next in the intermittent crime series on Tor.com: as the title implies, it’s about writing about violence. The violence in this case is the type that falls short of murder: assault, fight scenes… thumping.

I will probably move on (or up?) to murder itself in the next article.

Meanwhile, here’s an assault on your senses: I’m still playing with the iPad and the Paper Camera app, with the resulting beeyooteeful self-portrait:

Still not tired of playing with iPad filters...

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*Stubby the Rocket appears with the permission of the kind permission of the Tor peeps


All the little storytales, everywhere I go…

Broken house on 2nd

A drafty snippet from the current story in progress:

It was splinters, driven into the burns. They were lined up like little dominos, bristles that ran along the lines of my hand, life line, heart line, brain line… all the things palm readers find so much meaning in. Tiny little fenceposts of bristling birch, embedded in both hands, and each filament barely aglow with the blue that had come to mean magic.

“Go to jail,” I whispered. “Go directly to jail. Do not pass go.”

And behind me, someone answered, in a deep bass voice: “Ma’am? May I have some clothes, please?”

Between writing words for the Clarion Write-a-thon (up to 16,411 words out of 20,000 as of Thursday!) and teaching “Creating Universes, Building Worlds”–which is focused on short speculative fiction–I have been trying to read a few new short stories.

So far there have been four:

1) “Crazy Me,” James Patrick Kelly – http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/05/crazy-me It’s creepy, it has great build-up, and it ends abruptly. Like many of the people who commented on it at Tor.com, I’m not sure I got the whole point; I may need to reread it. But it has been a fair while since I read anything by Kelly, and I like his style. I enjoyed this a lot.

“The Guy With The Eyes,” Spider Robinson. From BEFORE THEY WERE GIANTS, which is an anthology edited by James Sutcliffe, of first-ever stories by some well-known SF writers. I was surprised that Spider’s first published story was a Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon piece, though I’m not sure why that surprised me.

I want to pick a piece from BEFORE THEY WERE GIANTS to add to the reading list for CUBW… not this time, so much, but in the future. I love the idea of the anthology, and the right newbie story by someone who’s indisputably regarded as Genre Awesome just seems like a terrific thing to include my course reader.

(Anyone read the whole thing yet? Got any faves?)

“Down where the Best Lilies Grow,” Camille Alexa. Jessica Reisman recommended this a few days ago, and it’s a lovely little short-short–moody, self-contained, with memorable images.
(http://10flash.wordpress.com/genres/10flash-fantasy-stories/down-where-the-best-lilies-grow/)

And, yesterday, Michael Swanwick’s “The Dala Horse”, (http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/07/the-dala-horse) which has a “Little Red Riding Hood” feel but is so much more. I currently have Tanith Lee’s “Snow Drop” assigned as a fairy tale variation in CUBW; I might add this in as an optional reading, or swap them. Michael was one of my Clarion West instructors, a last-minute addition to the teaching roster after someone (I can’t remember who) had to bow out. He was, I might add, awesome.

Also on the topic of short fiction, Kris Rusch says that the prospects for writing them are better than ever, thanks to the growth of online magazines and e-books. (http://kriswrites.com/2011/06/22/the-business-rusch-short-stories/) What’s your take?

Two new essays on writing at Tordotcom

photo.JPG

Two new articles on TOR in the past week. One is the second in my sporadically-recurring series on writing about crime: it’s about thievery, the lure of the caper, and it’s called Imperfect Crimes.

The other, Tales out of School, is an essay about what it was like to start teaching SF and fantasy writing at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program in 2005, at the height of the Harry Potter craze.

Enjoy! And let me know what you like, or don’t, or maybe even disagree with.

Rumble’s top ten reasons why he should be allowed in the kitchen

Rumble

10. Since when does ‘not allowed’ apply to felines, anyway?
9. You’re not letting me pounce on Minnow six times a day.
8. Cat hair and/or litter particles that end up in your digestive tract are hair and sand you don’t inhale or have to sweep up.
7. The adorable do as we please.
6. As the only male in the house, I find the policy sexist.
5. Seriously, you are totally welcome to help yourself to anything in my food dish!
4. Isn’t it dumb to have a rule you can only enforce when you’re home, awake, and attending to my movements?
3. Your grandma called and she’s good with it.
2. This power struggle is beneath you, human.
1. Interested stakeholders (me) weren’t consulted prior to the rule being implemented.

Exquisite Words

It is the word ‘pootling’ that makes this for me: I’ve been in this car, on this road, and that’s the verb that puts me there.

The drive didn’t take long but it was harrowing. Bunches of dead flowers were propped up at several turnins, marking the sites of fatal crashes. Merki took it slow, pootling along at forty, hitting fifty on straight stretches. A queue of cars lined up behind him, drivers who were familiar with the route forming an angry tailgated convoy, trying to embarrass him into hurrying along. He remained calm, checking them in the mirror, pulling over as much as he could to let them overtake, meeting their displays of aggression with a gentle raised hand and admonishments to ‘calm yourself down, pal.’

–THE LAST BREATH, by Denise Mina