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.

Getting personal

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Since Blue Magic came out on April 11th, a lot of my blogging energy and other kinds of attention have been drawn to just that–writing about the book, guest blogging about the book, travelling around promoting the book. This has, in turn and inevitably, meant the amount of personal news–your basic chatty stuff about my life–hasn’t been getting the kind of play it usually does here at Planetalyx.

I do prefer for my site to have a mix of all these things: writing talk, stuff about TV and film, foodporn, random this and that, the billion photos and things about what’s going on with me.

And, now that I’m done touring, I’m hoping to get back to that more balanced mix. I have things to tell, oh yes, and pictures to go with them. Here’s one of me and my cousin Alicia in San Francisco, for example, chilling out and having fun. (Also, all the new clothes I plan to tell you about? Came from Desigual, the store named on the bag A’s holding.)

Me and Alicia

Despite the piles of busy and the myriad distractions, I have done a pretty decent job of keeping up with the lives of those friends of mine who are still blogging. I’m hoping to keep that up, and expand on it. To start and continue some hey, how the hell areya? conversations as summer progresses. Doesn’t that sound nice?

So hey–how the hell are you? What are you doing this summer? Anything in particular you want to talk about?

Sunburst short lists released

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The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic has announced its short lists for 2011 and, among other things, Caitlin Sweet’s excellent The Pattern Scars is on it. The full list is here and includes books by Dave Nickle, Ryan Oakley, Geoff Ryman, and Catherine Austen.

Hearty congratulations to everyone on the lists!

What I #AmReading – Faithful Place, Tana French

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Faithful Place is a third time reread for me. I picked it up a couple weeks for two reasons. First, events in the life of me had conspired to make me feel excessively picky when it came to book-reading, and it was either read something I loved or don’t read anything at all. Second, French has another novel coming out in late July. It’s another Dublin Murder Squad novel, the protagonist is Scorcher Kennedy, and it’s called Broken Harbor.

The first time I read Faithful Place it was to find out what happened to a girl named Rosie Daly. For plot, in other words, and one of the things I love about French is she sets up developments I didn’t see coming, reveals that blow my mind and make perfect sense. She plays fair.

The second time, it was just to roll around in her beautiful writing style while seeing how she’d directed my attention to and yet not too close to the important stuff.

This time, though the novel was every bit as wonderful, it held no surprises. It was a bit like wearing a beloved and attractive garment that just isn’t new anymore. It was comfortable and satisfying, but a bit of the shine had come off. But it’s got me entirely psyched for Broken Harbor; Scorcher’s a pretty minor character in the previous book, and getting reacquainted with him before embarking on the new book has heightened my excitement.

Tick tick tick, Tana. I love what you do, and a book a year is awesome, but it’s nevertheless hard not to wish you wrote even faster.

Cover here:

And, as usual,
Previously read in 2012
BOOKS
1. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
2. Among Others, by Jo Walton
3. Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester
4. Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter
5. Kat, Incorrigible (Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson), by Stephanie Burgis
6. Remote, by Donn Cortez
7.The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet
8. one awesome draft novel by a dear friend
9. Property of A Lady, by Sarah Rayne
10. Hark! A Vagrant, by Kate Beaton
11. Black Blade Blues, by J.A. Pitts

Rereads
1. Faithful Place

I am up, and so is the new @tordotcom #Buffyrewatch

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It’s almost five in the morning and I am about to embark on the final, getting-home leg of this round of travel. This is the last bunch of not being home for a good long time, and I am looking forward to it. Blog entries and Writeathon words should start happening again regularly just as soon as I’ve had a day or two to lie around like a basking reptile, recovering.
Snake!

In the meantime, life in Sunnydale is beginning to look a lot like Christmas in my rewatch of “Gingerbread” and “Amends.”

This past five days have been incredible, delightful, wonderful fun and I am just plain grateful to have had the chance to go out on the road, see some old beloveds and new sights, do a little more Stormwrack research and read my work to people who are passionate about fiction.

And to those of you at the UBooks reading who pledged to donate to the Writeathon and thereby enter the Stormwrack naming rights contest… I’ll be in touch!