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.

Frim Fram Alyx with Ossenfay

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And, yes, shafuffa on the side.
Tomorrow I’m co-hosting Geekly Pleasures with Jules Sherred, whose review of Blue Magic contains one of those paragraphs that really does make the whole writing lifestyle seem like an endless round of hearts and ponies:

I have never been more thankful for a character than I am for the character of Ev Lethewood. Without going into extreme detail, Alyx did a superb job of illustrating what it like to be a trans man. It is always a wonderful thing when the LGBTQ community is represented in literature in a matter-of-fact fashion, instead of salaciously.
From Geeky Pleasures (share this quote)

I wanted exactly this out of Ev’s storyline. To reach someone, in that way, on that level. Part of me was terrified I’d failed. Seeing this was a joy and a relief.
Things of me: I’m in a bubble of unprecedented super-busy, all tied into the release of Blue Magic. My inbox is full of interesting and exciting things, including travel stuff: I will be in Portland, reading at Powell’s, on the evening of May 7th, and I will have other events to announce soon. There was FanExpo and my own launch and I’ve joined Pinterest and started a newsletter (join button’s on my site) and you’ve all seen the guest blog links. Plus fiction-writing, teaching, tax season stuff, and all the usual… it’s been a whirlwind.

I’m very happy to say I’ve gotten over a thousand words in on the current Gale and Parrish story this week, despite having a meeting at 6:30 OMG ayem Tuesday and being quite bloody-minded about going outside for a walk every single damned day.

Spring in Vancouver is not to be missed. It’s cool and rainy out as I write this, and the double-flowering plums are spectacular right now. They are brighter and more vivid in the gray; bright sunshine is lovely, but it washes them out a bit. In another week or so they’ll start to edge past their prime, and the slightest gust of wind will fill the air with pink confetti. The tulips are in bloom everywhere. The days are longer and noticeably warmer, the trees are leafing up, and the birds are bubbling over with song in the mornings. Soon there will be ducklings and baby Canada geese to coo over. And, if I’m lucky, baby herons. Here’s about two percent of the heronry in progress:
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All around the town

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If it’s Tuesday, Buffy must be in trouble. And I rewatched it, here, with this essay entitled History Lessons.

I also was a guest on the Scifitalk podcast this past week. You can listen to that interview here. And speaking of podcasting, I’ll be cohosting Geekly Pleasures with Jules Sherred this Friday. I’ve also written about five of my all-time favorite things, from getting paid to watch Quantum Leap to gay marriage, on the Geekly blog.
Finally, Library Journal likes me, they really like me–but their link leads to Viagra adds, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

FanExpo Vancouver was outstanding!

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Butt in chair report: I wrote 549 words this morning on a story called “Island of the Giants,” another of The Gales (the first being Among the Silvering Herd.) I did manage to do about 200 words worth of work on the story at FanExpo Vancouver, in between surges of meeting fans and hanging with D D Barant and Spider Robinson. I also got to meet comic artist Shane Rooks and, oh, some actor guy. Brendan? Nicholas or something? He was on this show I kinda like, maybe you’ve heard of him?
No, seriously, squee! It was cool. And I was pretty cool, too, which means a) no picture of me in NB’s lap but also b) no criminal charges. Instead, here is a picture of me and DD Barant.
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Quite a few of the fans who stopped by wanted to know how one goes about selling a book. Don and I handed out bits and pieces of the usual commonsense and quite general advice: write daily or as near to it as you can manage, lots of persistence, seek feedback, start figuring out how to use it.
Meanwhile Shane Rooks, beside me, had young artists bringing him their portfolios. His advice to them was generous, specific and awesome: this dragon would be better if we could see its face, consider working in other media to get a better perspective on the subject, here you’ve got the light coming from the wrong angle for the shadows, and this figure’s anatomically incorrect.
I am envious of this. A visual artist can look at a whole piece in a second and give–or so it seemed–a lot of concrete feedback. At the Surrey International Writer’s Conference (and I’m sure other venues), there was something of a writer variation on this: I’d get three pages of a manuscript and the author would get fifteen minutes of my first impressions. But this is as close as that gets. There’s no quick-glancing at someone’s entire novel, obviously, especially at an event jammed with, I kid you not, 80,000 fans.

Saturday witterings

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I am sitting home by the fire tip-tapping as the cats patrol the living room. Kelly is away just for the night–her sister’s mom died and all the Robson Sibs have gone to Kamloops to be with Sue during the Celebration of Life. (Dad had three wives, so this isn’t K’s mom. She’s okay, just being an excellent sister.)

I am going to be appearing at FanExpo Vancouver tomorrow, selling and signing books, so I didn’t go.

In cheerier news, my Blue Magic launch at the UBC Bookstore went very well. Joseph Wu came as a guest artist and made this fabulous paper portrait of Sahara Knax, late in her transformation.

It was bright and sunny today and I got out a bit in the morning, and then in the afternoon I went and spent a quick, peculiar hour with Barb. (We were both wiped out and so a lot of it amounted to parallel play, with iPads.) Since then I’ve been home trying to sort through a prodigious pile of tasks.

There’s a big fly buzzing around the living room and Minnow is scrambling around the joint chasing it; it’s better than TV. Speaking of which, I’m thinking of making a BtVS Rewatch (“Homecoming” !) my next task.