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.

From caterpillar comes lace and fluffings


Burnaby Lake wildlife

Originally uploaded by Alyx Dellamonica

Lately most of my posted photos have been of ducks or other birds, so here’s an invertebrate for you all, a glowy sunlit butterfly. This one, like so many of my recent shots, came from Burnaby Lake… it almost makes the world look summery, despite the fact that our weather has been ambivalent for months, waffling to and fro betwixt warmth and deluge.

I have been tip-tapping at the computer since I got home from my weekly Wednesday breakfast date with Kelly: teaching, answering e-mails, and fiddling with my web site. I am working on two sites at once right now, and contemplating diving into a third. Soon, though, I will head out to the cafe and go back to wrestling with the current work in progress, a thirty-page sample of a book I’ve tentatively titled FILTERING FOR RAIN, or perhaps THE RAIN GARDEN. (For the couple of you who’ve seen THE WINTERGIRLS in MS, this would be the Dill book.)

The sample would be for a grant application, and the readers are looking for literary merit. What I have so far feels like two nicely literary scenes sandwiching a bit of plotty filling. I want another nice, image-laden, freighted-with-import something to pull it all together. I haven’t quite figured out what that is, though, and since I slept quite poorly last night I don’t know how successful I’ll be when I attempt it after lunch. But I’m a big believer in plugging away, even if it might not be overly comfortable. The head against wall bash-bash-bash seems to usually get me somewhere, sooner or later.

I am also supposed to go on a 5K walk this evening with a bunch of people from the mentoring gig. Unless a nap happens after the fiction-writing, I’m thinking that’s coming off the agenda. I could do the walk itself half-asleep, but coherent conversation would be beyond me.

Hammer hammer, saw saw

I converted alyxdellamonica.com to a WordPress site in June of 2010, with the goal of integrating the static site about my writing with the more dynamic content of my blog, which originated on Livejournal, and whose archives still live there. I have great plans for this site, and given my posting habits, I know that all of the areas you see in the menus on this site will soon be brimming over with new, up-to-date, recent, sexy content. I will continue to grab text fragments and post mini-reviews of books as I read them, talk film and TV, discuss the music I’m listening to as well as whatever I’m singing with my choir, and write about food, wine, cheese, and eco-consumerism.

I am also getting ready to launch an interview series, Journeys, which will discuss the career paths of various authors in the SF and fantasy fields.

I could dig up old posts on some of these topics and whip off a few new ones, if I wished, but I want this process to happen organically. I want to write good thoughtful posts, things you will enjoy, things that will make you hungry or thoughtful or maybe even mad once in awhile–things that will get you talking. In the meantime, this post is just a quick note to say I’m sorry there’s nothing more on point here just yet, and to beg your patience while I generate content that’s really worth reading.

One on One

I accept students for online and face-to-face mentoring on an individual basis as often as my schedule permits. If you have a project that might benefit from an in-depth analysis, drop me a line at alyx@sff.net.

Fun slavedriver seeks budding novelists…

As of today, I have two slots left for students in Novel Writing II: Writing a Novel The Professional Way, the new (to me) novel workshop course I am teaching via the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program this summer. ‘Fun slavedriver’ is how one former student has described me, and the class does promise to be a fair amount of work–everyone in it will write fifty pages of a novel as well as workshopping those of a few of their classmates.

The official start date for class is July 14th, but my classroom should be open July 12th; people will get acquainted with the discussion forums, introduce themselves to each other, and talk a little about the books they are going to work on before writing and critting begins in earnest.