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.

Food and Language

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I spent most of yesterday puttering slowly around to all the groceries and in some cases buying frivolous things. One of my mentoring gig folks had mentioned a power granola called Holy Crap; I bought that in Urban Fare, for $12! For a cup! (Two tablespoons are supposed to be enough to fill you, but still.) It wasn’t terrible, and the tiny portion was reasonably filling. But a day later I’m at Calabria, having had my morning visit to the loo, and at the risk of TMI… I did not see our Lord and Savior just now while I was having my sit-down.

These are my standards. For $1.50 a serving I expect not only filling and nutritious but at least a preview of the second coming.

But Sechelt hippies need jobs too… if they can make a go of selling *legal* hemp products to the well-off peeps of the West End, more power to ’em.

The slow was because I’d needed caffeine to get through Italian and then was up past 11:00 a.m., so even buying food was a mental challenge.

I have to spend part of today reviewing Italian. Class ends next week and I’m going into part II; I feel as though I might have a fighting chance if I get the grammar under my belt. I just have to decide I’m gonna, and then rearrange my catastrophically confusing notes. And get over a few things: when I found out that the word(s) for it were the same words we sometimes use for a/an on Thursday, I did have a little internal temper tantrum. “Fuck you, Italia, with your la/lo/le/li!”

Ironically, this is all brushing up my English grammar considerably. “Here’s the transitive form,” says Amalia, and of course I have to think it through in English, and then sometimes in French, before I really get it.

I caught a real break with Italian I this latest time through: only three of us signed up, so there was lots of individual attention *and* they shortened the class by half an hour… which meant we were leaving at 9:00 p.m. instead of 9:30. As I am the girl whose day starts at five, that extra half hour was golden. When Italian II starts next month it’s gonna be a jolt.

Who you gonna call? (Funkbusters!)

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My current, lovely, talented and very hardworking group of Novel III students is reaching the end of another quarter, with fifty new pages under their belts, and some of them are feeling the re-entry burn. They have more to do, and they’re falling prey to the “Is this shit? Can I finish?” blues.

I’ve told them they’re not alone, and offered a few of my tried-and-true funk breaking-techniques (punitive amounts of caffeine, bribing myself just to keep on, freewriting, Ignoring it and Hoping It Goes Away), but I am always happy to hear more. The more so because my current story, “Wetness,” is kicking me in the head with the Pointy Boots of Vagueness.

**

On another note, M.K. Hobson explains here how you and twenty-six of your friends can earn Clarion West $1500 just by joining the Write-A-Thon.

The Science-Magic Continuum

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Every SF story has one thing in common–at its heart is an element of the fantastic that cannot be removed without killing the piece.

Aside from that, all bets are off. A story can be about witches, astronauts, or time travelers; it can be about aliens, superheroes, magic sentient dogs, or a U.S. President with an improbable name like, say… Oprah Winfrey.

The nature of the fantastic element in a given story is a key (though not the only) element in determining what genre you are writing in. If your story features wand-wielding wizards and noble, horseback-riding swordsmen, you are probably writing high fantasy. If it is the tale of some ultra-cool VR hackers using technology that modern society may well invent in another six months, odds are it’s cyberpunk. Though genres in speculative fiction are primarily marketing distinctions, they are also distinct art forms with their own conventions and styles. Whenever possible it is a good idea to at least know something about the type of story you are writing. You may not choose to follow the conventional rules of that genre, you may even mix and match between genres… but you should always be making an informed choice to break the established rules.

For detailed breakdowns of genre definitions, check here:

Literary agent Jennifer Laughran defines the genres and categories beautifully in this blog post.
Other Worlds Writer’s Workshop
Or try Wikipedia, which an article on science fiction genres, and more on fantasy subgenres than you will ever need to absorb.

It’s important to remember that no SF universe is free of some magical element–no matter how believable our speculation is, what makes a story SF is the inclusion of technologies or social conditions currently beyond our present-day experience. Similarly, no fantasy universe is free of science–almost nobody writes of magical realms where simple physical realities like gravity and fire don’t operate normally. The further to the SF side of the spectrum your story lies, the more you will want to extrapolate plausible technological details for your setting. Far across the continuum on the fantasy side, you might create a magical system that requires equally rigorous treatment as you set out its rules and limitations.

Though the middle-ground genres are most flexible, any piece of fiction across the Science-Magic continuum can be presented in a way that skews it closer to one end or the other, depending on the language used, the amount of technical explanation devoted to making the impossible story elements plausible, the types of characters and the overall treatment of the impossible. A few examples:

Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern novels read like fantasy in every way… but they are SF. The settlers of Pern are offworld colonists, and the dragons are genetically engineered.

In a film like The Matrix, virtual reality is a magical realm where anything can happen and a privileged few have genuine superpowers. Meanwhile, the “real” world has a dystopian cyberpunk gloss.

In the science fantasy novel Channeling Cleopatra by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, discovery of Cleopatra’s tomb and corpse allows scientists to inject her genetic material into a test subject… who then becomes possessed by Cleo’s spirit. What could have been a simple psychic-phenomena novel is thus given SF overtones.

The important element to consider is this: regardless of where you place your story on the science-magic continuum, you will have to create an internally consistent world, whether by researching plausible scientific advances, extrapolating sociological trends, or inventing something from whole cloth.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN CHOOSING A GENRE TO WORK IN…

  • What do you like to read?
  • What are your favorite genres of speculative fiction? What do you love most about them?
  • Who are your favorite authors and which of their stories have affected you most strongly?
  • What kind of story are you trying to tell?
  • What kind of reader are you trying to speak to?
  • What sort of magazine or anthology can you imagine your story appearing in?
  • What are the artistic and storytelling conventions of that subgenre?
  • What element of the impossible will your story contain? Will your story fall apart without it?

Joining the Write-A-Thon

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I have just signed up for the Clarion West Write-A-Thon… they’re trying to get 100 writers joined up for the summer, so I thought I’d play along. If you might like to sponsor me, there’s a link here. Clarion’s a terrific workshop and a good cause. I got to meet some of last year’s class and their excitement about writing and general enthusiasm for SF and fantasy writing was infectious and delightful. You could be paying to teach your next favorite writer evar.

I’ve never done this before, but it’s pretty straightforward. The site says:

Sign up by June 18 to participate as a Clarion West Write-a-thon writer. Pick a writing goal: something that’s a little stretch; something that motivates you. Shadow the workshop from June 19 through July 29. Then write, write, write! Write 15 minutes or 4 hours a day, 250 words a day, or maybe 8000 words a week (we call that a “Swanwick”); revise a story or a chapter of your novel every week; complete a story, novella, or trilogy; submit three short stories to professional markets; or do something else completely different.

My goal is to write 20K of fiction between June 19th and July 29th. Ideally this will wrap up two half-written stories in progress and get me a little further into the current novel.

Exquisite Words

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Here is the lovely chapter one opener of Louise Marley’s The Brahms Deception. (The book has a short prologue, too.)

Roses spilled over the garden wall surrounding Casa Agosto, blooms of scarlet and pink and white blazing against the pale stone under impossibly bright Italian sunshine. Below the village of Castagno, forests and fields glittered faintly, as if washed in gold. Here and there, grapevines stretched and twisted in long, straight columns. In the valley beyond, a brown ribbon of road meandered along the blue line of a narrow stream. The Italian hills looked like bolts of dark green velvet, rolling gently from the ancient hilltop where twelve houses, each named for a month of the year, clustered along cramped streets. The houses were tall and narrow, trimmed with window boxes and surrounded by small gardens. Saints’ niches pierced the outer walls, their tiny statues nestled amid offerings of tiny nosegays or bunches of herbs. In the garden of Casa Agosto, the branches of an ancient olive tree drooped to the grass, heavy with unripe fruit. A wooden bench, painted with a rustic scene of wooly lambs in a green field, nestled in its shade.

It was all real, Frederica reminded herself. Everything was real. Except for her.

What I like in this is that it’s classic scene-setting. We get an abundance of imagery, an opportunity to really see Casa Agosto, and to get a feel for what it–and by extension–the tone of the novel are going to be like. We get color and romance, we get two separate mentions of Italy, in case the first one goes past too quickly, and the way the first paragraph is structured also tells us that Casa Agosto itself is important. It’s not some random house the characters are going to pass through and abandon.

And then we get a Question, in the form of Frederica and her musings about her unreality. If the setting itself isn’t enough to engage us, we now get something to be curious about. It’s as though she’s let us look around before taking our hand and leading us into the scene.