About Alyx Dellamonica

After twenty-two years in Vancouver, B.C., I've recently moved to Toronto Ontario, where I make my living writing science fiction and fantasy; I also review books and teach writing online at UCLA. I'm a legally married lesbian, a coffee snob, and I wake up at an appallingly early hour.

Hatch battening

Getting the new novel drafted and getting out for a walk every single day, whenever it’s somewhat nice out, have been my big priorities this month, with the effect here in the blog that there’ve been a lot of word count posts and “Weather fine, lots of spiders” entries. I have a few Journey interviews out, awaiting answers and of course I’ve had the Favorite Thing Ever and Quantum Leap stuff on the go, keeping me busy. It’s all very pleasant, and I’ve enjoyed sharing my Sunburst excitement with you all.

On which theme: Indigo Springs is the featured novel at Jim Hines’ site, as part of his First Novel Friday feature. It’s mirrored on LJ, here.

I have spent some of my remaining copious spare time trying to get the Out in Harmony facebook fan page to automatically load notes from the main choir website. It’s supposed to, and it says it is, but it always loads up everything and then stops. In the meantime, I’m manually cross-posting. (My own page loads notes from WordPress to Livejournal to Facebook quite happily, so there’s a little bucket brigade of data, and I played with getting the choir an LJ too, to see if it would help. But my site comes with more bells and whistles than the choir’s, and that includes the widget that kicks off the whole sequence.)

Choir itself has been a blast from the recent past. We are mostly relearning pieces I know for a twentieth anniversary / greatest hits concert, and this means singing a lot of my favorite songs.

Autumn has also brought myriad shifts on a number of fronts. Our digital TV provider upgraded our gadgetry Monday, which meant two days of disruption to both me and kelly-yoyoKelly followed by an incremental (but worthwhile) improvement in service. I’m sifting through my eating practices in search of a similar tiny shift toward better nutrition. I’ve taken the arcade game off my iTouch in favor of spending my mental downtime listening to CBC Podcasts, watching TED Talks, and playing word games and Sudoku. Mental composting, I hope.

I’ve bought new shoes, a nice dress, and the best winter tights ever. I’ve had the fireplace tuned, I’ve made sure our travel and medical insurance is renewing, and I’ve thought about (but neglected, so far, to follow through on) taking the bedroom apart and hoovering out every last speck of dust. I’ve planted some fall bulbs, but haven’t yet put pansies atop them. Small, gratifying combing of the life-in-progress. I am glad to have had the energy–thank you, August vacation!–the focus and the help from K in achieving them.

And I’m not the only one savoring the excellence of fall on the coast:
Seawall

Rain Garden, Phase One

Tuesday’s words on THE RAIN GARDEN came to 1,454, bringing me to a total of 38K and change, and to the last scene. One or two more writing sessions should do it, and then what I’ll have is this skeletal draft in need of a new title, some research, and much overall fleshing. In the meantime, I’m very pleased with the bones.

I’ve been madly chasing a number of projects and events this week. TOR.COM is hosting a series of Quantum Leap rewatch posts, by me–the first of them is on the pilot, Genesis, and can be found here. Meanwhile, the Tor/Forge newsletter is crowing about Indigo Springs winning the Sunburst Award. All of the books on the short list were TOR books, so they have extra cause to be proud.

And here’s a sign of fall, for you all:
Fall leaves

Slouching toward Wednesday

I have a new favorite blog, and it is Hyperbole and a Half. The Alot entry may be the most perfect illustrated post I have ever seen. (Badger, I suspect you will really love this one.)

Here is a newly-grown starling, sharp-edged and new and full of possibility:
YA Starling

Monday’s THE RAIN GARDEN words: 1,145 for a total of 36,575. It’s all very sparse and slenderly put together at the moment, but I am cruising toward denoument. So in one sense it’s nearly done and in another, perhaps half-finished?

Sunburst Photo Shoot

Every now and then I will be at a wine event with kelly-yoyoKelly and someone will look down to the region below my chin, and say, “I know you, don’t I?” Or, perhaps, in a sort of questioning voice, they’ll go: “I’ve seen those, um, spots… before?”

To which I reply, “Oh, yes, they’ve been the guest cleavage on the Full Bodied Wine Blog a few times.” Because by they, you understand, the other party doesn’t actually mean the spots.

Anyway. My Sunburst Award arrived in the mail on Friday, to much excitement. I promptly threw on a nice top and went out on the deck for a photo shoot. Here’s me, unpacking the beautiful medallion with my usual ladylike delicacy, and then posing with it and the spots, in a more SFnal and less wine-soaked context.