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.

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.

Girlfriend Testing on the #BuffyRewatch on @tordotcom

slayerWay back when I was watching BtVS the first time through, I thought “I was Made To Love You” was the saddest damned thing I’d ever seen. Then, of course, “The Body” aired the following week.

I’m hoping that as the show gets grimmer, the rewatches will get funnier. Because, really, it’s tougher to say silly things about the nigh-perfect episodes, and out-funnying the funny ones is tough too. But the actual watching–some of it is going to be very grim, especially as I hit S6.

In which I #amreading crime, Victorian style (by @TheLitDetective)

keep readingAfter Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification I jumped into The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars. In addition to also being a book with a very long title, Paul Collins‘s Murder of the Century is a book with some overlaps, in terms of its subject matter, with the fingerprinting history. It’s one of a number of books I’ve read lately about this era in New York history: there was The Poisoner’s Handbook, last year and The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (which I remembered as “The Hearst Thing.”)

The Murder of the Century is, in its way, also a Hearst thing: it’s about how two rival newspapers–one owned by Hearst and the other by the Joseph Pulitzer–got into a crazy ratings battle triggered by the discovery of a dismembered corpse.

It’s obvious to us all at this point that sensational murders (or, to a lesser extent, sensational deaths) garner audience in big numbers for whatever news outlets feature them. This book is about the genesis of that knowledge. What’s most intriguing about this specific case is how deeply the reporters of these rival papers were mucking about in the actual detecting: running down evidence, for example, and proposing their own ‘favorite’ candidates for the identity of the headless corpse. At one point Hearst essentially leased a crime scene so his reporters would have sole access to it. But wait, there’s more! He then had his guys sabotage all the phones for blocks around so that reporters staking out the perimeter would have to leave the vicinity just to call in.

That’s just the iceberg tip of some crazy reporter antics.

It’s a nicely-written true crime story and a nifty snapshot of both the history of journalism and of policing in New York in the 1880’s, well worth your time if any of that appeals to you. Here’s the cover:

Paul Collins, should you wish to know more about him, is TheLitDetective on Twitter.

And, since some of you have asked: no, there isn’t much of this that’s for a specific project, though the fingerprinting history has already proved itself extremely useful. Fiction will come of all this reading eventually–it always does–but I have no specific plans yet. I’m basically just mulching the Gilded Age for the joy of it.

And next up is more of the same, in a way: I’m about a third of the way through Matthew Goodman’s Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World.