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.

En vacance

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We flew to Calgary on Thursday for a family visit–flying was uneventful, as such things go, although there was an overwrought, huffing woman in the security line behind me, very clenched and angry-looking, emitting a put-upon sigh every thirty seconds or so, who ended up sitting right next to us. I decided to believe she was afraid of flying.

I had brought a few treasures from the Grotto al Formaggio with us in an insulated lunchbag; my sister in law loves cheese, and it’s a short flight. The security folks confiscated the ice pack I’d put in with them–no big surprise, I suppose, but K and I got up a fun riff about whether somebody could make a go of a low security airline for risk takers. In Canada, we decided, it would be called Slapshot Air.

We had to cancel the Onoway run to see Grandma. The reasons were good, but we are all disappointed to be missing each other. Instead we spent Friday puttering and doing bits of work at Casa Bro, playing with their Apple TV, comparing e-book readers, and embarking on a soup-off. K opened this event with a roasted butternut squash and corn soup: as I type this, she is making it and the house smells amazing.

(later) We made a quick, fruitless trip to a mall, looking for jeans and to see if the bookstore had a box of the Indigo Springs mass market edition in the back–I haven’t seen it yet. They might, apparently, but it isn’t unpacked yet; if I go back Sunday, I might be able to fondle… er, sign stock.

And soon Niecelet will be home from daycare and the worshipping can begin!

(still later) Ooh good worshipping has been had! I have some awesome pics!

The soup-off has become more of a food-off: Bro has decided he can’t match K’s soup, so we must have barbecued ribs tomorrow, and not one of us put up a fight over this ruling. He and Sis are off buying meat while we entertain the four year old adorableness. So far she’s tried to kill me with a racquetball, ripped the roof off her playtent, and consented to cavort in her Curious George costume.

Droplets

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I am using Hallowe’en as an excuse for a few more spiderweb shots, and in the next few cobweb posts, what you’ll be seeing is spider silk as a delivery system for close-ups of drops of water. I had a luxury of choice on these, good light and good conditions, and all the time in the world to contort myself around fences and other such obstructions. That I ended up uploading less than a hundred good shots is something of a miracle.

Here’s one… enjoy, and happy Friday!
Cobweb closeups

Sweet mysteries of the UK

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Sherlock has begun airing on PBS and, like practically everyone else whose opinion I’ve heard, I loved it. I thought Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch were brilliant, I liked the script, and everything else I could squee about would be so very spoilery. I cannot wait for the next one.

Before SHERLOCK, Masterpiece aired S2 of Wallander, featuring little Kenny Branagh in the title role–remember when he was just that Henry Five guy?–as a deeply emo Swedish detective. These mysteries may not have the crackling struck-by-lightning appeal of Sherlock, but they’re good stories, well directed, with intrusive-but-nifty camera work and a stunning color palette. They offer a bit of a peek into another society (as filtered through British TV) and have good casts and solid enough mysteries.

There are many inappropriate humor moments to be had on this show, though. Wallander himself is precisely the sort of basket case that brings out a certain heartlessness in me. There’s been lots of Pause and Heckle: “Dude, if you’re so busy being upset that you don’t pay your bills, don’t go crying to me, in the dark, when the power company cuts off your juice. And, man, could you have said something dumber and more hurtful to your daughter? Hey, bummed out guy, why the uber-peppy ringtone?”

Seriously, the guy needs a nanny.

Wallander’s excuse might be that he appears to be the only competent cop in his particular unit: the others, as far as I can tell, have taken a full course of Useless Pills and a precautionary run of Huh? Boosters. They don’t help when he’s in danger, they barely blink when he goes all “Hey! People are dying, OMG, I’m so upset!” No, they shrug, dump unwanted boxes in his office and order pizza. No wonder he’s stressed out!

(Wallander’s obvious slash interest, as played by Richard McCabe, is Competent and Cares, but he’s a forensics guy, and thus his reach is limited.)

Humor aside, I definitely want to see the first season of this.

Nesting, reading, Leaping around at TOR

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My review of Marie Brennan’s A Star Shall Fall is up at Tor.com; Marie, you might remember, also did a Journey interview here a while back.

In related news, my Quantum Leap rewatch on “Another Mother” is also up at Tor.com.

The past couple of days it has been pouring rain in torrents, very chilly and dark, the kind of rain where you might as well be swimming, and so I sensibly spent most of yesterday indoors, working either at my desk or reading by the fire.

Whole cobwebs

This hibernation weather that tends to trigger nesting urges, so on the weekend I bought a new set of very soft cotton sheets and a microfleece blanket.

A web is a concrete accomplishment

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I’ve been looking through my cobweb photos from Burnaby Lake, all of which, incidentally, are spider free. It’s all threads and plants and water drops. There were so many I had to divide the upload into two batches, one of fragments and close-ups, another of whole webs, like this one.

Whole cobwebs

A web, I can’t help noticing, is work. It’s a finished thing, purchased with life and effort. The orb weavers eat their webs each night and spin them anew in the early hours of the day, I’ve read. And I’ve been thinking about that as I look at the pictures, and simultaneously work through a bit of teaching work. I am in the early stages of Creating Universes, Building Worlds, which is the first UCLA class I ever developed. It’s a short fiction workshop, all SF/F/H, and the thing that stands out about my current group is how well read they are. I’ve had classes that know from Asimov and Bradbury, Herbert and Rowlings… and almost nobody else. But this month I’m hearing them talk about Marion Zimmer Bradley and Kelley Eskridge, too, Octavia Butler and Charlie Stoss and Elizabeth Bear, people from all over the genre map. It’s exciting; I can’t wait to see what they come up with as their stories develop.

In the winter–which means January–I am teaching Novel II again and come spring it’ll be Novel III, the latter for the first time. My mind is full of teacher stuff for all three courses: interesting challenges for the Creating Universes folks, what do I want to do better with the Novel II class (last time I taught it was my first, so there’s lots thought and feedback and potential tweaking), and how do I want to structure Novel III?

I work on one class, set up another plan a third. Different cycles, no web-eating, less easily quantified results, but it’s perhaps not a wholly unrelated process.