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, the Pinboard

writing pinboardOne of the things I do as part of my teaching practice is keep an eye on links about writing and, when they seem right for a given class, post them in my classroom at UCLA. What I’ve taken to doing as of this quarter is pinning the links on a single board called, not surprisingly, Writing. This way all of my classes can access all of the links, new and old, that I’ve posted.

As I’ve begun to do this, I’ve realized that posts without graphics (the text-heavy stuff we writers naturally tend to favor) don’t pin well. I was always aware that essays with at least a few pictures were more readable–giving the eyes a break, yadda yadda–but there’s this extra element of ‘need a picture’ now that is part of the reason you’re seeing all these little meme-y things and screengrabs popping up on my site.

Visuals aside, this board has some great writing essays on it. Go, read, enjoy!

Giving the gift of me me meme…

write memeI am trying to increase the functionality of my web site’s “Shop Planetalyx” page. Upgrade here would mean any improvement from the site’s previous state of “not all that useful, thanks very much.” So I’m updating the links to the various versions of my books and e-books, and also seeing which of my various short stories are still available for free online.

There are three of my “Proxy War” stories, for example. The Sweet Spot is the most recent to appear and yet the earliest, in chronological terms, of the squid stories. In it, a teenaged girl named Ruthie Gerrickle and her brother Matt try to survive the Battle of Kauai. Five Good Things about Meghan Sheedy falls quite a bit later. This time the fight is the Siege of Seattle. It’s one of two published by Strange Horizons. The third, of course, is “The Town on Blighted Sea.” The girl who was Ruthie has long since become Ruthless, but the war is over. Her side did not win. But life, strangely enough, goes on.

You may have also noticed I have figured out how to generate Pinterest memes. This may or may not be a phase I’m going through.

New #BuffyRewatch essay, now with more troll!

And by that I mean an actual troll, not mean commenters. The essay is here, the episode is “Triangle.” Enjoy!

Latest cutest Instagrams, now with more cat…

Happy almost-the-weekend, everyone!

your app hereGoogle’s announcement that it was killing off its reader app caused me a few moments of pain on Wednesday, until I realized that what I love is not so much the Google part of the equation but the fact that it interfaces nicely with an app called Flipboard. And this is something it will cease to do when they kill the service, but it was a moment’s work to surf up a “best alternatives to Reader for iGadgets” article and from there find my way to Feedly, which seems like an awfully pretty and workable solution.

My needs are pretty modest, I must admit. I keep up with a few blogs, I browse Longreads, and I follow a few people who can be relied upon to post intelligent writing related links, some of which I forward to my students. (And, lately, I pin them for posterity.)

So, while I go make sure I know how to use Feedly and catch up with all my favorite stuff, here’s a little streamer with the latest Instagram posts.

[instapress userid=”AlyxDellamonica” piccount=”7″ size=”90″ effect=”fancybox”]

 

Telewitterings – Arranging matches for Cumberbatches

Here at Chez Dua last weekend, we watched Parade’s End, a five-part mini-series based on the books by Ford Madox Ford. Look! The ‘Batch is blonde!

And we enjoyed it very much indeed, but on one of our snack breaks, I said “They’re arranging matches!” Because for those five hours what we were watching was paced exactly like the subsumed-drama British version of the imaginary movie described here by Eddie Izzard in this not-safe-for-work excerpt from Dress to Kill.