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.

What do you love about where you live?

By | |
Comments Off on What do you love about where you live?

Toronto, Day 1074. I am sitting on a bench in Nathan Phillips Square, a few weeks shy of our third anniversary of moving here. I’m looking at old City Hall and the new Toronto sign that was installed for the Pan-American games. This vast public square is a five minute walk from my door, and if the rooftop garden was open I would be sitting there instead.

Instead, I am watching a couple hundred people futz around in the early evening sun, waving selfie sticks, chasing pigeons, practicing synchronized dance moves, and climbing on the Henry Moore statue, The Archer, in front of the main entrance. There’s a young guy going from person to person asking them to take pictures of him making a “two thumbs up” gesture.

In another week or two, they’ll refill the fountain. Right now it has been cleared of its winter layer of skating ice, and is a bare concrete surface. People are taking advantage of the opportunity to get their loved ones inside the sign from a closer angle. There are kids and dogs and cyclists and seniors, single pedestrians, couples, families, tourists and packs of friends. It is Saturday night, and nobody’s in a hurry, and from this distance everyone seems to be at play, in a good mood.

The Square has two moods as far as I have seen. One is this – tourists and Torontonians chilling out. The other is thronging with some kind of organized activity, whether it is a farmers market, Nuit Blanche, a political rally, a big art show, or a formal parade. It’s not a park or in anyway green space, but it’s right next toOsgoode Hall, which has a law library, beautiful grounds and all the squirrels you could throw a nut at.

So there you have it: I love City Hall.

Telewitterings: Daredevil S2

By | |
Comments Off on Telewitterings: Daredevil S2
image
In the normal course of things it might have taken Kelly and I upward of a couple of months to watch Daredevil S2, but: i) we came back from England and promptly caught colds; ii) the first eight or so episodes, with their un­flinching look at the ethics of vigilante action, were especially well-crafted and intriguing; iii) every little thing Foggy and Karen did was pure, unadulterated magic. Except maybe the gist of her think piece at the end. And hey, it’s her first feature, so I’m willing to forgive.
The end, though I enjoyed it, was fuzzy in a lot of ways. It felt crammed, with far too much shoehorned into it and a few missteps.
Where Daredevil excels, in my writerly opinion, is primarily in the non-supernatural drama, in the relationships between its three principals. It does other things very well too, of course: fight choreography, stunning graphic novel visuals, chewy moral quandaries, systemic corruption, and beating the crap out of Matt himself.
Where it falls down? In making Hell’s Kitchen seem less like 2016 New York, post Chitauri disaster or no, and more of a relic from the crimey, hard-nosed Eighties. It’ll reference Matt’s Catholic damage–Claire’s lecture about same was tiresomely on the nose–but it doesn’t drill down to give any kind of real sense of what that’s like. Most of all, the villain plans are thready. At the point in the story where we move from character exploration to OMG, gotta usher everyone to the bigtime battle scenes, the baddies’ machinations unravel. And not in an Oh, I see what you were trying to pull off there, Boyd Crowder, sucks to be you kind of way.
Fisk’s scheme, in S1, made a lot of sense… for a time. Raze the Kitchen, build towers for the well-heeled, divide up the inevitable neighborhood crime rackets and make billions on both the legal and illegal ends of the transaction. Okay! We understood who stood to gain and who would be hurt.
Still, his plan fell apart when he turned on his own syndicate.
The S2 baddie is on a quest, for religious reasons. They need their plot coupon-y spoiler spoiler plot thing, for their Holy War. A war with whom, really, besides Scott Glenn? And afterward they’re going to… do what, exactly, with Hell’s Kitchen? With Matt’s “My City,” out of which they should posthaste get? Are they gonna have that city? Slaughter whoever shows up? Forbid any sneaking around on the rooftops and in the cellars by non-ninja-individuals? I can’t think of a single Nelson & Murdock Avocados at Law client who’d truly be affected by total ninja domination of the Kitchen’s dark corners. None of the Hand stuff meshes particularly well with Frank’s story, which is about a failure of law enforcement and the system. Frank’s mess is at the heart of what Nelson Page Murdoch are struggling with.
I get that Matt needed a distraction so he could let down the team, I do. I get that the whole story couldn’t be Frank. But Frank works so well that Nobu & Co. feel grafted on.
As for Frank’s Boss Monster, that whole thing collapsed into a huge and disappointing coincidence.
Still, 90% of what I saw I loved. I liked where the characters ended up, I think Matt’s final choice was the right one, I’m super-curious about what Karen will do now, and I may well rewatch the whole shebang quite soon. And I’m hoping that S3 takes us into the vigilante piece they missed examining: Matt is an altruist vigilante, while Pun (as Wolverine always called him) is an agent of vengeance acting, at least in the beginning, on his own behalf.
What did you think?

Nom Nom Aurora Hunter

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Nom Nom Aurora Hunter
cover image for "The Nature of a Pirate," by Cynthia Sheppard

Cover image for “The Nature of a Pirate,” by Cynthia Sheppard

As I dictate these words, I am sitting on the Go train, headed to UTSC to pick up some things I left in the sessional office. Even though I am teaching in summer, too, they clean out everything between quarters… which makes sense, if they don’t want the shared office to become a cluttered den of crap. It’s a good task for what I hope will be my last day of reduced activity due to the cold.  An almost recreational commute, a quick errand, and then back home to see what else I can make of the day.

Next term I will be on campus Thursday afternoons and evenings for the next level of the same speculative fiction class. I am excited about being there, both for the sake of the teaching, which is delightful, but also to see what it is like there in the summer. Fewer icicle photos, more flowers, is my guess.

In other pleasing news, I am currently up for two awards: A Daughter of No Nation is nominated in the Best English Novel category for an Aurora Award, and I am in the running for something called the K.M. Hunter Artist Award. Kelly’s novella “Waters of Versailles,” meanwhile, is in the running for an Aurora too, in the Best English Short Fiction category. If the cool around our house runs any deeper, we will have to issue hip waders at the door.

Good news – agency deal signed with @LizaDawsonAssoc !

By | |
4 Comments
San francisco mural

Win!!

I am pleased and excited to say that Caitlin Blasdell of the Liza Dawson Associates Literary Agency has taken me on as a client.

My previous agent has been in the process of retiring for some time, and while I knew a change would be good for me both personally and professionally, I was looking forward to seeking out a new agent/author relationship with all the joy one brings to the prospect of a triple root canal, sans anesthetic. I hate transition rather passionately.

In the end–and as such things generally are–the search was nothing like I imagined. And, incidentally, nothing like dental work. In fact, it was a process that yielded up some really good writing, and promises, I think, to inspire still more. That’s an outcome that leaves me very happy indeed.

London (not the Ontario Version) Camera Horror

By | | , , ,
2 Comments

image

I am newly back at work after a thoroughly fun-filled week in London, where Kelly and I devoured one incandescent play, seven museums, multiple castles, some exquisite cream tea and scone combos and Tube Stations beyond count. We posted highlights and selfies as we went, along with dance videos.

One of the social media things I’m incredibly enchanted by, with regard to my own photography, is watching my Instagram map fill up with little tags of the places I’ve been and seen. This is a snippet of my posting activity for the period when we were gone.

If I had nothing but time to spend on zooming in and out on this map, attempting to create the maximum density of Polaroid-shaped images that prove I Was So Totes There!, I would do little else. Dinner would burn and the children would starve. One Of the main reasons we walked through Covent Gardens was so I could fill a blank spot on the map.

One of the other geeky things I did was accept a Fitbit challenge from a friend who perhaps should have guessed I’d walk as much or more if I was on vacation. He did very well, though–I didn’t quite walk him into the ground. Still won, though. (This concludes the unattractive gloating portion of our post.)

I didn’t mention this online while we were travelling, but I killed my camera on the first night.

This wasn’t an entirely terrible thing. I have been engaged in low-grade waffling about my birdhunting camera for a fair number of months now. It was somewhat elderly, but not so frail it couldn’t have been donated to a good home. Like all of my cameras, it was a point and shoot, but for a P&S it has an enviable zoom for nature photography, and it let me get good candids and some appealing faraway details on architecture and other inaccessible pretty things. But I haven’t done much birding and wildlife shooting since moving to Toronto, and Birdhunter was heavy. I have wee, wimpy overused wrists, after all.  The thing was also always a bit of a lemon: glitchy in minor but irritating ways. I was trying to figure out what I wanted in my next camera. I did a lot of thinking and feeling and maundering and I won’t spell it all out here, lest someone mistake this as an invite to advise me.  I hadn’t reached any conclusions.

So I took it to London and, on the first night in a bathroom stall at the globe, hung it on a hook that did not support its weight. Smash! So all but the first hundred or so of the 1572 London pics in my Flickr Album were shot with the iPhone. I have a set of lenses for the phone, a gift from a friend, and I experimented with them for a couple of days–I’d been meaning to do that, so hurrah! Then I decided to just keep it simple.

Upshot: most of the pictures I got are ones I’m quite happy with. I grieve for the close-up I would have gotten of that fox in Kew Gardens. I got so close! (The reason: an old lady was chumming the lawns with bread.) I wish I’d had a shot at one of the parrots. But the phone worked decently well for tourist pics, and the next phone, with a better set of lenses… that may be the route I take until I’m ready to start seriously birding again.

Why, yes, I did say dance videos. Here’s Kelly performing at the Tower of London.