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.

Feline protest of Powell’s Reading

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I am very happy to say I’m going to be reading at Powell’s Books in Oregon (the Cedar Hills / Beaverton location) on Monday the 7th, at 7:00 p.m.

This is a genuine bucket list item for me: here in the Pacific Northwest, Powell’s is pretty much mecca for bibliophiles, and I’ve always wanted to read there. When I am out and about in my Powell’s shirt, strangers ask, often in hushed tones if I’ve been there, and when I brag that I’ve even been part of the big post-Orycon group author signings at the store. . . well, they’re impressed. You must be a real author after all, is the reaction: it’s serious cred.

I’ll be reading from the steamy and mildly hilarious “Wild Things,” and signing copies of Indigo Springs and Blue Magic, and perhaps even a few anthologies I’ve had stories in. If you’re in Portland, I hope you’ll stop by.

As prep for this first foray into BLUE book touring, I hauled out the little red suitcase Wednesday and started putting in things I’m afraid I might otherwise forget. The battery charger for the camera, par example, and a certain catnip-flavored item for an exalted Portland entity named Xerxes.

So maybe it’s the smell of the treat in the suitcase, or perhaps it’s just the obvious sign that I’m gonna be gone, but Rumble is unimpressed. He’s spent much of the past two days alternating between dragging the case around the house and rendering it inaccessible by means of passive resistance.

Feline protests Powell's Reading

He was also extremely friendly on Wednesday night, and would not be deterred by the squirtgun, which means I spent more of the night awake than is optimal.

Bug Wars, Wars of Bug

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I seem to have finally won a long, frustrating, anguish-inducing war against the hackers who kept slipping malware onto my site and trying to infect people with same as they came in to learn about my books. I had to bring in mercenaries: specifically, the fine folks at Sucuri Sitecheck, who run a service that scans your site for you for free, and another service that keeps it uninfested for $90 bucks a year. After weeks of flailing attempts at DIY and instructions from my site host that were so simple they required a computer programming degree to comprehend, and promises from same host that now the site really was clean, honest, when it just friggin’ wasn’t, Sucuri had me squared away within twelve hours.
Now that I’m not dumping my non-existent free time into fighting the malware wars, I have taken the advice of a couple extremely savvy friends (writer Matt Youngmark and artist Racheal Ashe, if you must know) and started a newsletter. The Join button is on my site and my plan is to issue chatty notes that you’ll all enjoy reading–the sort of stuff that goes into the letters I write, all too infrequently, to all the lovely peeps I aspire to keep up with. Plus, also, whatever photo I’ve taken lately that I’m most proud of, exclusive sneak peeks at works in progress, bragging about my UCLA students who’ve sold fiction and links to the latest courses and me stuff. Try out the join button or just let me know if you’re interested.
And when I get an issue out, if you think it’s missing something, let me know that, too.

Rambling on the Internet

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If it’s Tuesday, Bring on the Buffy Rewatch: Became, Besaw, Beconquered!

Blue Magic Virtual Tour Stops
Last week, Edmonton’s Wayne Arthurson interviewed me for Gigcity. And Janni Simner asked me about my deep deep love for Vancouver, so I blogged about that very happily indeed.
Finally, Muppet asked a question about all the court proceedings in my fiction, so I wrote about that for the Women in SF&F Spotlight at the Fantasy Book Cafe.

And also I #amreading some things…

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Many many things. I finished Remote awhile ago–as I am greedy, I found myself telling Donn Cortez I wished it had gone on longer–and I’ve joined Pinterest but haven’t really figured it out yet.
I’ve also read a novella James Patrick Kelly kindly sent me, “Men are Trouble“. This came about because I was writing an article about gender in SF and fantasy, and trying to remember the title of his short story, “Lovestory.” So, in that way we all have now I’d thrown a query out to the Twitternets and had an answer, from Jim himself, in 24 hours. We got to talking about gender and science fiction and he mentioned his other gender stuff, in particular this novella.
So. “Men are Trouble.” It’s a near-future hardboiled detective story. There are aliens in it, aliens who–it’s apparent early on–came to Earth to help humanity pull itself out of the environmental and economic hole we’re currently digging ourselves into. And who, as part of their tough love program, disappeared every single man in the world. Jim wanted to know what I thought, and I’m sure he’d be interested in your reaction, too.
What did I think? The obvious effect of removing the male sex from the population, in this story, certainly isn’t to disappear human conflict or power struggles. It brings a couple things into the light: intergenerational friction between women, and the aliens’ failure to understand that simply wiping out guys (and, presumably, transwomen) isn’t the answer. The story and the culture he creates is very true to human behavior.
It’s a terrific story, and I’m still thinking about it a week later.
I also couldn’t help but compare it to James Alan Gardner’s “A Clean Sweep with All the Trimmings,” which is also feminist in its sensibility and a hardboiled. And, just a little, to my favorite hardboiled ever, Nicola Griffith’s Aud series which opens with Blue Place. The trio makes me wonder what it is about the hard-boiled that makes it such a good lens for stories about gender inequality. Or are all genres equally good for this, and it’s just that I’ve been exposed to these three excellent examples.
Changing pace, I’ve moved on to Caitlin Sweet’s The Pattern Scars, which is lovely and dark and intriguing, and which is also on the Prix Aurora Ballot, by the way. It’s beautifully put together on a sentence-by-sentence level and is well worth close attention.