Author Archives: Alyx Dellamonica

About Alyx Dellamonica

Alyx Dellamonica lives in Toronto, Ontario, with their wife, author Kelly Robson. They write fiction, poetry, and sometimes plays, both as A.M. Dellamonica and L.X. Beckett. A long-time creative writing teacher and coach, they now work at the UofT writing science articles and other content for the Department of Chemistry. They identify as queer, nonbinary, autistic, Nerdfighter, and BTS Army.

More Moving Things to Elevate Your Day

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Awesome: One of the friends who has been taking such excellent care of us is the brilliant and thoroughly wonderful Linda Carson (whose Ignite Waterloo talk Art… WTF? is five minutes you’ll never regret.)

Here’s a shot of Linda and Kelly at the Art Gallery of Ontario on our first (failed) attempt to go there and partake of the wonder. Failed, because AGO is closed on Mondays.

My lovely @kellyoyo and beloved friend @lccarson outside AGO, with new friend Henry Miller and my pink backpack.

Problematic: There’s an elevator repairhuman strike ongoing in Ontario. In order to keep our building’s elevators in service, the management company has been running them like old timey elevators, with security guys parked inside to keep the rogue tenants from abusing the hardware. For a week we’ve had to get them summoned, via radio, to come to the ground floor and convey us up to two. But now both elevators are out of service anyway, so I expect they’ll open up a stairwell and allow us to rampage up and down.

Makes you wonder how often elevators do in fact break down, doesn’t it?

The happy bit for us is that we are on the second floor right next to the stairwell. The climbing is negligible and it shouldn’t even be that sucky for our bed delivery guys, Saint Someone Please Let them Come Today, to haul our mattress and boxspring up to the new, cavernous, furniture-free Chez Dua.

The less happy bit is that everyone else will be tramping by too, pretty much along the wall to our bedroom. Said tramping woke Kelly at three last night. We will be looking into a white noise app, I think, to replace the comforting drone of traffic that lulled us to sleep on First Avenue.

The Ugly: It’s not actually all that ugly, but our moving truck hasn’t actually left B.C. yet. Delivery will be a week later than projected by Great Canadian Van Lines, and we shall be camping amid the emptiness for at least another week. I am beginning to question whether we needed to bring anything at all. Surely if I’ve done without all that stuff for this long, it’s not necessary to my health and well-being. What was in all those frogboxes anyway?

What we're taking with us to Toronto. #yyz

Three things about the transition to Toronto

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The Awesome: West King Street is so terrific. It’s like having all the awesome of Commercial Drive stretching endlessly in just about every direction, and then you slam into downtown.

The Problematic: So our building is under construction. Okay, noise and dust, who cares. But, actually, our suite’s not quite finished either! We had guys in today replastering the ceiling. During the one stretch of time when I actually had to be home to make important phone calls and send important e-mails, I did it closed up in the bathroom, with le Throne as my office chair and somebody’s sandbox as my desk.

Our building is being constructed around us, day by day.

The rest of the period of plaster-guy exile I spent, with K, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. About which, OMG. It deserves its own entry in the category of Awesome.

The Ugly: The bed that was supposed to be delivered on the 16th? Well, it just wasn’t. It looks as though the situation’s gonna be resolved as of tomorrow–so I won’t say much about it–and we have a temporary workaround to sleep on in the meantime. But we have suffered an epic, faith-in-humanity-shattering customer service fail.

One foot in the door, one foot down the street…

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We are 32% moved! Or thereabouts. We are in the new apartment as much as is possible for two women whose bed, purchased courtesy Condobeds, did not arrive when promised. We are staying in an AirB&B down the road as a result–they’re saying they’ll pay, and the bed is due after the long weekend.

The place still pretty much looks like this.
The new apartment awaits the arrival of our stuff... sometime next week.

The kids are adjusting. Rumble got brave comparatively early, but Minnow has only just emerged from behind the dryer. Interestingly, she wedged herself on the kitchen counter between the stove and the fridge, which was where she hunkered down in the old apartment after we took away all the stuff. It’s architecturally familiar!

I gave Rum the equivalent of a bath just now and petted Minnow’s fur with wet hands as much as I could. Double duty–they get more hydration licking the water off, and they get clean.

When we first arrived and I looked at WiFi networks in the building–to access ours using its temporary name and password–I got a brief vanishing glimpse of one named ISIS Mainframe. So now our network is named ODIN Mainframe. We are extremely amused by this.

Umm…. what else? The water wasn’t turned on for the washer and dryer, so some hilarious but undamaging washing machine hijinx ensued before we got the thing working. And today has mostly been an exercise in walking out to places to get things we need and then walking the frack back. Peter Watts helped us out a ton and he is a god. We will be feeding him delicious food as soon as our kitchen arrives.

Off My Lawn! Steven Harper vs. The Solitary Writer

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SteventreeSteven Harper (Okay, Canadians, settle down–that’s Steven, not Stephen) is one of my colleagues from SF Novelists and his new novel, The Havoc Machine, is the fourth novel in the Clockwork Empire series.

He Tweets, speaks Facebook, and has a web site about the Clockwork Empire series and his other writings here.

Here’s a picture of him alone (unless you count the tree) as he very kindly joins us today on Off My Lawn! to take on the myth of The Solitary Writer.

Marcel Proust famously lined the walls of his bedroom with cork to shut out the world because the slightest noise wrecked his concentration and stopped him from producing even a word. Writers, he claimed, must work in solitude. Indeed, writing by definition is a solitude-heavy profession laden with lonely people.

Virginia Woolf agreed with him, to an extent. Woolf maintained that in order for a woman to write fiction, she needed a certain amount of wealth and a room of her own. Solitude.

Oh, if only.

I’m a single father of three sons. During the time it took me to write the above words, I had two conversations. For the first, my youngest son danced into my bedroom office room wearing nothing but a Spider-Man cap and a smile while he sang, “See my butt!” to the tune of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST’s “Be Our Guest.” For the second, my middle son stormed in to complain that his little brother was singing naked in the hallway outside his room.

I wrote my steampunk novel THE HAVOC MACHINE under six months of these conditions and worse. While I was busily putting the adventures of Thad and Sofiya into words, I was interrupted for homework help, argument moderation, requests to play soccer, transportation to music lessons, and several bouts of “Hey Dad–are you busy?”

I can hear Virginia Woolf gleefully pointing out how right she was. See? All those interruptions just hurt writing! But here’s the thing:

Every other weekend, the boys go to their mom’s house, and I =do= get solitude. A whole weekend of it. You’d think I’d be rolling up my sleeves and really pounding out the words, right?

Nope. I don’t produce any more wordage when the boys are away than I do when they’re at home.

I think it’s the interruptions that allow us to write. They pull us into the world, keep us grounded in reality so we can produce proper fiction. Utter solitude might have worked for Proust in his cork-lined room, and Woolf may have yearned for a room of her own, but ultimately, it’s the writing, not the situation, that create the book.

Havoc Machine Cover2About The Havoc Machine

In a world riddled with the destruction of men and machines alike, Thaddeus Sharpe takes to the streets of St. Petersburg, geared toward the hunt of his life….

Thaddeus Sharpe’s life is dedicated to the hunting and killing of clockworkers. When a mysterious young woman named Sofiya Ekk approaches him with a proposition from a powerful employer, he cannot refuse. A man who calls himself Mr. Griffin seeks Thad’s help with mad clockwork scientist Lord Havoc, who has molded a dangerous machine. Mr. Griffin cares little if the evil Lord lives or dies; all he desires is Havoc’s invention.

Upon Thad’s arrival at Havoc’s laboratory, he is met with a chilling discovery. Havoc is not only concealing his precious machine; he has been using a young child by the name of Nikolai for cruel experiments. Locked into a clockwork web of intrigue, Thad must decipher the dangerous truth surrounding Nikolai and the chaos contraption before havoc reigns….