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.

Where has all the summer gone?

I had a fallen maple leaf in my hand not an hour ago, a glorious tattered mosaic of red, orange, and green. It conveys a a sense that I blinked and someone whisked July and August away while my eyes were closed. I’m not complaining–at least, I hope that’s not how it seems. Just noting that the past ten or so weeks, which have been crammed with lovely things and people, have as a result zoomed past me without brakes.

Summer in Vancouver can have the pace of a leisurely saunter along the Seawall. Sometimes the good weather comes in May, and stays and stays, through a warm September that segues into the beauty of a West Coast autumn, so gracefully you can’t say where the one ended and the other began. Other years, the demarcation is sharp: the kids go back to school and the air’s suddenly chilly. The trees drop bales of leaves all at once. There’s frost in the air and the raincoats come out. Either way, fall means counting golden orb spiders along the Grandview Cut, where they proliferate in the dozens upon dozens. It means seeing the roofs steam with thawing ice in the morning, and watching how the fallen leaves get rain-sodden and leave their imprints on the pavement. It means squash and turnips and beets and all the other harvest vegetables; it means stews and casseroles and comfort food.

But even as it scatters maple leaves at my feet, the weekend is showing us a lot of gold and sun, reminding me that summer’s riches aren’t spent quite yet:

Vancouver flowers

Cruising back in time… to Victoria!

Victoria was a bit of a pit stop, as cruise moments go… the ship was there for about four hours in the evening. With that in mind, kelly-yoyoKelly and I had decided the thing to do was make straight for Munro’s Books. My uncle came along for the hike–between one thing and another, we hadn’t spent much time together over the course of the preceding six days.

It was a pleasant and scenic walk. We saw the Legislature, naturally…
Victoria

and, in accordance with B.C. tourism laws, I took the obligatory shot of The Empress Hotel!
Victoria

We happily dropped a pile on books before Munro’s closed, and decided that was enough. (Note to any Victoria readers: I did sign the copies of Indigo Springs they had in their sf section.) Back to the ship we went, in a nice taxicab.

We used to go to Victoria from time to time, years ago. It was a handy and inexpensive tourist-type outing for us. Then life shifted, and all our trips Vancouver Island became family focused, taking us to Qualicum Beach instead. I have been wanting to go back, and it was nice to get a glimpse of the city, but a proper visit is still on the Gotta Do list. The bookstore was, of course, lovely. If I was gonna do one thing, that was the right one. No complaints there!

But there’s so much more to visit & revisit: Craigdarroch Castle and the Royal BC Museum (Where the Past Lives!), and flower-mad as I am, it’s a little crazy that I’ve never made it out to the Butchart Gardens.

Any of you have a within-reach tourist locale you’ve been meaning to get back to?

Name dropping, with chicken and artichokes

Most of the writers I’ve interviewed for the Journey series have agreed that the big joy of working in publishing is getting to know so many cool and delightful people. I got a concrete reminder of the essential truth of this when Peter Watts came through Vancouver on his way to Worldcon. We spent Wednesday evening catching up over dinner and wine.

Peter and I got to know each other when Starfish first came out–I reviewed it, and wasn’t entirely sold. We exchanged a few e-mails about my review and by the time the second book was out I’d changed my mind; Peter was kind enough to forgive me my reservations. All of which are gone: read Peter! He’s great!!

Peter is also a big fan of Rumble–who responds by treating him with uncharacteristic aloofness–and even named a head cheese after him in Behemoth).

Anyway, it was one of those lovely, magical nights. He introduced us to Mr. Deity and we talked a lot about TV–Dexter and Breaking Bad and the ill-fated tv pilot Virtuality. Even as writers, it’s easier to talk tv than books–there’s still an awful lot of it and you cannot watch it all, but the areas of overlap are greater. This is part of the appeal of book clubs, I guess: if everyone agrees in advance to read something, you know you can talk about it with someone.

(On somewhat of an aside, another writer I know, Nancy Richler, is in a book club that specifically focuses on books its members failed to finish the first time. They’re currently wading through Henry James’s The Golden Bowl.)

We have more company coming to town this weekend… it has been an action-packed month! However, I am hoping to find time to post some Victoria pictures and do some grading.

A For Announcing…

While I was out of town, my friend Nelson Agustín launched his first book, A for Adobo, an alphabet book featuring the A to Z of food from the Philippines. Nelz is an incredibly gifted photographer, and I love his work. The images in this book are mouthwatering. Check out his cover:

A for Adobo

I’ve always adored alphabet-themed stuff: I wore out a couple Cat in the Hat Dictionaries as a kid, was delighted by the Jane Yolen and Allen Eitzen Alphabestiary of Animal Poems, and dimly recall a Harlan Ellison collection of what’d now be called flash fiction, called “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet.” Under other circumstances, I can easily imagine accumulating a pile of such things.

In any case, if you have similar alphabetic proclivities, if you love food, photography or perhaps just want something new and lovely to share with your favourite preschool-aged loved one, I recommend this beautiful book with all my heart. It can be got from Tanahan Books for Young Readers or directly from the author—drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch.

Congratulations, Nelz!

Ketchikan

Now that I have been home for a stretch, Ketchikan is starting to seem like something that happened a long time ago.

My favorite thing, hands down, was getting to see salmon spawning for the second time ever. Kelly and I went on a camping trip to Port Alberni with her parents, oh so many years ago. We had fun, and came home with many stories, and even saw bears. I was amazed by the fish, and have always hankered for a second look. So… spawn ahoy!

Ketchikan


Ketchikan is pretty. Its riverside boardwalk reminded me a bit of San Antonio, which probably means I haven’t been on a sufficient sample of riverwalks.

My cousins had been keen to see a bald eagle (the caged one was not so exciting) and I was scanning for birds all along. It hadn’t sunk in that this is, on the one hand, an eccentricity of mine–“We have to stop! I heard something peep in that bush!”–and a skill I’ve developed over the years. I was also faintly surprised to learn they don’t have eagles in San Francisco. They’re common here, and I think of our ecosystems as being very similar. Anyway, I spotted this one winging it to a tree, and it was very obliging and pose-y.

Ketchikan

The four of us walked upstream to the Ketchikan hatchery, declined to pay for the tour, shot fish from a very stinky beach, and were generally amazed by nature in action. Then we puttered back for another dunk in the hot tub and loafing with books by the ship’s windows, looking for whales. (Did I mention we saw lots of humpbacks, and a few orcas? They were just too far off to make any of my shots great.)

It was around this time that Kelly and I also embarked on making a list of shipboard observations:

–The hot tubs aren’t exactly scorching.
–They mix the drinks strong!
–This does in fact make the comedians funnier, though Merl Hobbs is quite good. Sadly, Merl’s internet presence consists of a poorly put together Myspace page with no video content that I can see, so I cannot prove this to you.
–The ASL interpreters of Merl were even funnier.
–Three and a half turns around the sundeck is a mile.
–They really want to sell you stuff.
–Including pictures! Bands of roaming photographers, some accompanied by people dressed as pirates, orcas, bald eagles, etc. are waiting to pounce on you. The next day, the pics are up in a gallery: $20 for an eight by ten.
–Little girls crushing on my cousin’s supersmart 13 year old, who is living for a September 4th Green Day concert.
–It turns out that Green Day sounds an awful lot like Rush.
–Bingo every day. Trivia quizzes. A spa that threatens to remove 8-10 inches from your body with a seaweedish treatment.
–A very nice and knowledgable naturalist who lets you know whenever there are whales about, and who then reminds you the ship has binoculars for sale.
–A TV in every stateroom with a route map on channel 14 and a live feed from the front of the ship on channel 15.
–Also pay per view. When Kelly was sick we watched Greenberg.
–Pay Per View’s inevitable consequence–Cineloathing: Greenberg was so not worth $9!
–Low ceilings. Long corridors. Towel animals. (Photos to come!) To my surprise, plenty of elevators. Lots of mirrors. Music feeds that loop on a really short cycle, so that we have now heard The Doo Doo Doo by the Police a zillion times in our chosen reading area. On the Lido deck, we had Mamma Mia, much Beatles, and oldies galore.
–A profusion of U.S. accents that make you want to drawl.
–A video arcade whose Aliens game was broken. How sad is that?
–A spectacular floor mosaic leading into the sorta non-denominational chapel.
–Extremely attentive wait staff who really don’t buy into the concept of skipping dessert, and who are obliged to either dance or sing for us after every meal. I couldn’t help feeling it was mean to make the waiters sing and dance.
–A deeply punitive attitude toward the cousin with food allergies.
–Woefully adequate food. Unimpressive decaff espresso.
–OTOH, Tea! Whenever I wanted it. Nice and hot.
–Seeing other cruise ships in the night.
–All the thousand colors of the sea, from deep violet, through the greys, into the blues and greens.
–Orange quarter moon hanging over the ocean, leaving a smeary ochre line on soot-grey water.
–How did I not know that Alaska has its own time zone?
–A briefing on how to successfully get off the ship.
–A magician who taught the kids tricks–a nice guy, who was able to talk the thirteen year old into trying escargot
–A strong tendency to always go with middle of the road as opposed to edge.
–Hideously slow, deeply overpriced, satellite Internet.
–One cold soup offering every night. Lots of iceberg lettuce.
–A rule that ships must stop in one foreign port per cruise–hence the stop in Victoria.