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.

SFF Love-in spreads and gets a hashtag from @JulietteWade – #SFFLove

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3891536336_0d52c64a4c.jpgHurrah! Setsu Uzume and Jamie Mason both took up the challenge of yesterday’s post about fantastic people in the SF/F/H community. And over on Facebook, Juliette Wade very sensibly pointed out that this love thing needs a hashtag.

Setsu and Jamie, you are entitled to claim a pink-hearted copy of Child of a Hidden Sea. And one lucky remaining player can claim the third. (After that, if this thing seems to have legs, maybe there’s some chance of soliciting prizebribes from other participants.) But bribes aside, thank you. Just reading your lovely words to Nick Mamatas and Marguerite Reed and Maryann Mohanraj and Eric Flint and so many more–the pure unadulterated affection of it gave my soul a toasty glow.

In other delightful news, another hashtag, #FemmeSFF, spawned some terrific Tweets yesterday about female writers, editors, and other amazing women in publishing. I salute whoever came up with that scheme. Bigtime. May your blessings fall thick on the ground and always in the most advantageous tax bracket.

As I write these words it’s 6:30 p.m. on Thursday night. Kelly is off to Barrie, reading with some of the other awesome writers in New Canadian Noir. I have been writing final critiques for Novel Writing III, to the tune of 11,000 words of “Here’s what I like, and here’s what you can do better.” I dictate critiques; as I’m having my entire head frozen tomorrow so my dentist can patch one of my teeth, I figured the better part of valor was to finish today. But I’m punchy. I need to walk away from the computer and do something else. I’ve heard NPR has an awesome true crime podcast. Let’s see, shall we?

This thread is definitely a to be continued proposition… in the meantime, love to you all and good night!

Sober-dialing my peeps, because the hootch makes my head hurt

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Who farted?

Who farted?

So… I figure maybe you’ve noticed there’s shit going down in the SF community.

(I feel this statement will be true whether this blog article finds you this week, or next week, or in October, or the weekend of World Fantasy, or on my mother’s birthday. If you want links, ask me. I generally know what’s up.)

Shit, as we know, comes from assholes. But let’s save the sphincter talk for another day. This, my dear friends, is about Us.

We SF/F/H writers are a diverse, talented, beautiful, savvy, well-informed brainalicious hive of stunningly–omg so stunningly–hardworking artists. We labor to churn out novels and stories and poems and jokes and reviews and how-to-write essays for our newest worker bee friends. We donate money we barely have to Kickstart fantastic projects because holy shit, we have to read that book! We Patreonize other stuff. We help each other when we need our DNA sequenced, our roofs patched, our cats vetted, our teeth pulled. We communicate, and we do it better than 90% of everyone. And when justified snarking is called for, in service of truth, justice and the ongoing fight against malignant retrograde thuggery, some of us snark so well! So hilariously and passionately that even though it brings the rest of us flocking ringside to fights we’d rather not witness, the sheer virtuosity of the LOLs make those essays a weird pleasure to read… even as they call down people whose staggering hypocrisy gives us all the runs.

Battles, I feel, aren’t just about the barbwire and the trenches. They’re not just lobbing the poop shells back at the other guys. I appreciate the shell-lobbers. Thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Another thing fights are about is morale. And I saw some cries of despair on the Internet this week that made me think that ours may be starting to stink.

I’d like to think there’s an alternate universe somewhere where Chuck Wendig got to spend a morsel of his time and wit and considerable talent this week on a hilarious, profane, cunningly crafted essay about how Saladin Ahmed’s first book should be read aloud at Boy Scout campouts. And in that alternate universe, the thing gets crazy-wide play and thousands of shares. I think we owe it to ourselves to, some fine year, take turns emulating John Scalzi’s Thanksgiving Advent project until it’s a total fucking meme. I want to live in a world where our hilarious giants of the blogosphere don’t have to spent quite so much time looking up the stats and quotes that prove some tiresome dude’s specious homophobic allegations about this person or that one are not only wrong, but ridiculously, mind-bogglingly, allergic-to-logic much? wrong. I want someone to make me laugh until the tears run while saying something unexpected and improbable about how awesome the last SFWA business meeting was and they can’t wait for the next one.

There’s a deep-set cynical part of me that absolutely hates any kind of talk that smacks of what (my interior monologue always wants to assure me) is namby-pamby peace and love positive thinking malarkey. I am not really a here’s my other cheek, go ahead and smack it if you wanna kind of woman. Definitely not why can’t we all just get along? guy. But people, we are a cool fucking community and love–unlike mortgages or even Netflix–is free. I think we could do worse, in terms of upping our game, than writing each other some overt unabashed public goddamn love letters. To claim back a little of the time and energy and attention that’s being devoured, vampirically and with malice, from our pool of creative energy. To shower it on the laudable, the brilliant, the fer the love of YouPickTheDeity deserving. To be about us, if only to remind ourselves that whatever else happens, we’re creatures too fine to let ourselves get sucked down to the bitter hater marrow.

So: Hey, man, I love you guys. Like, ummm… Happy fiftieth, all of SFWA! I OMG hearts and ponies love so much about you. For starters, not a week goes by that I don’t send some student of mine to Writer Beware to keep their ass from getting handed to them by scammers.

I love Susan Palwick for spinning her own wool and praying with sick people when she’s not writing books I love. I love Nicola Griffith and Kelly Eskridge for their lifelong crazy love of music and the Eighties Dance they’ve lobbied for at the upcoming Readercon… when they’re not writing books I love. I love Peter Watts for being hilarious and brainy and questioning every idea I have so closely that every magic system I come up with sounds–after he interrogates it–like it could be quantum physics if only he was writing my stuff instead of me. I love Nalo Hopkinson for making weird lovely dolls and dresses and nurturing new talent. Sarah Chorn, I love the conversation about disability in SF that you’ve brought into the party. I love David Gerrold for trudging the mucky path to the upcoming Hugo Ceremony with dignity and commonsense and even flashes of humor. Thank you, David! I love Pat Cadigan for soliciting hand-crocheted are-you-kidding-me snake hats while she’s doing chemo. I love Michael Bishop for being a superlatively humane human being. I love the writers who created and run the Book View Cafe and Kristine Smith for sharing recipes that make me drool and Gemma Files for knowing every goddamned thing about movies ever. My sippy cup runneth over. I could go on and on and on. We blow my mind.

After each of the above call-outs, please do add the phrase, “… and also being a kick-ass writer.” Because every one of these things–every one of these people and their fiction too–deserves it own standalone essay. I could do a whole separate list just about the books and characters I want to thank so many of you for creating. And another separate list about the amazing editors and publishers who publish our words and make us look even smarter than we are and hire kick-ass illustrators to dress them for the party. There could be a whole other other list for Locus and Clarion and Turkey City and the Science Fiction Museum … well, you get the idea, right?

I will mail a copy of my most recent hardcover, signed in pink Sharpie with a big goddamned heart on it and my sincerest thanks, to the first three people to write one of these love letters. (And to then tell me about it, and send me their address). Maybe you don’t want my recent hardcover; maybe you’d rather have one of my killer story critiques or an ship or island on Stormwrack named after your dog, or an only-available-in-Canada copy of the Bond anthology coming out in November. Maybe you’d rather whatever it was got signed in teal Sharpie. All your Sharpie colors are belong to me. We can talk, is what I’m saying.

I am offering this blatant open challenge cum bribe to you all: now and then, let’s use our time and talent to create and something, here in our lovely shared fictional palace, that splatters the Internet with that same happy we’re all getting from the baby sloth videos we’re turning to, in desperation, after a hard day on the Facebooknets has plunged us into a pit of misanthropy. Let’s give each other the hit of dopamine now and then. We probably won’t use up the Internet’s supply of kitten pics anytime soon, but why take chances?

Fighting the shitzkrieg is non-negotiable. Frontline fighters, I salute and love you! But if we can’t all occasionally jitterbug madly, with a bottle of hootch and the best band we can scrape together on any given moment’s notice… well, I fear that way lies a lot more rubble and far less magical city.

Jane Lindskold and the Heroine Question

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Artemis Invaded V2I’m just getting to know Jane Lindskold, because we both have stories in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse anthology The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth. And so I’m finding out (because she tells me so, and I believe everything I’m told, and also because it’s true) that she is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of something like twenty-five novels and about seventy short stories.  Honestly, she keeps losing count.

Jane lives in New Mexico, not with wolves, but with cats and guinea pigs.  And a lovely husband.

Since these mini-interviews are all about heroine… heroineism? I asked:

Is there a literary heroine on whom you imprinted as a child? A first love, a person you wanted to become as an adult, a heroic girl or woman you pretended to be on the playground at recess?

This is a really tough question for me, because the answer is “No. There isn’t.”

Certainly female characters existed and I read about them, but I never imprinted on Nancy Drew or wanted to be Trixie Belden or Jo March.  I liked Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, but, again, I didn’t want to be Laura or Mary.

If you narrow the fields to SF/F, there were far fewer major female characters when I was a girl and none of those I encountered became role models for me.

Do goddesses count?  I always thought Artemis was very cool…  Athene had appeal, too, except when she got stupid over that golden apple.

If I “imprinted” on any fictional character, it was Mowgli from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

What was it about Mowgli?

I think I liked Mowgli because he functioned outside of the social matrix. Early in The Jungle Book, Mowgli leaves the wolf pack to live by his own code. His “brothers” remain close to him and he certainly has friends, but he’s not interested in letting anyone else run his life.

The Artemis I liked was very much in the same mold. My attraction to her had less to do with any particular story/myth than the sense of freedom I got from her. When I was a girl, the three things I wanted most were a canoe, a non-kitchen knife, and a large dog. I never got any of them, though I did have a canoe on loan for a few years.

Of course, both Mowgli and Artemis associated with animals on a more or less equal basis. I have no idea why, but this has always appealed to me.

Would you say, then, that Mowgli and/or Artemis inspired any of the female characters in your work?

There are two who definitely belong to this lineage.

The most obvious would be Firekeeper, the central character in what – despite the formal series title, “The Firekeeper Saga” – everyone just calls “The Wolf Books.” Firekeeper is not Mowgli. For one, she never becomes the Lord of the Jungle, or the ruler of much of anything except her own life.

She cares passionately for those she takes as her own, human or otherwise.

My new “Artemis Awakening” series also owes an obvious debt to this lifelong interest. Adara the Huntress, the main female character, is definitely an “Artemesian” figure. Not a virgin, though, but then neither was Artemis originally…

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About this post: The Heroine Question is my name for a series of short interviews with female writers about their favorite characters and literary influences. Last week’s installment, with Martha Wells, was all about Erma Bombeck. Now that we’ve delved into Kipling and the Greek Pantheon,  I think we can safely expect this series to cover a wide range of subjects, both real and imaginary!

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Jane Lindskold has a web site here and can also be found online on Twitter and Facebook.

Say again, Sam? Getting your stories crooked.

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write memeOne of the things that Chuck Wendig’s brilliant post In Which I Critique Your Story (that I haven’t read) points out–in a hilarious yet gentle way–is that writing teachers see beginning authors making the same mistakes over and over. He covers a lot of those basic errors within the post. Memorize every word.

When I teach novel writing at the more advanced level for the UCLA Writers’ Extension Program, I get to see the next generation of mistakes… the things writers do after they’ve learned the lessons of Chuck. In Mysterious Informants, I’ve talked about some of the dynamics that arise when you have one  in-the-know character teasing your protagonist and the reader, while failing to reveal any useful plot clues. Now I want to talk about a different kind of informational exchange: it’s a scene where one character is telling others about something that the reader has already witnessed, in an on-stage, pie-in-your-face, OMG watch out for the clown-car, Noooooo!!! unforgettable kind of scene.

Whatever it was, it mattered to the characters… obviously, or they wouldn’t be updating the people who were home, tucked into bed, during the clown car collision. But what I see in newer novelists tackling this transaction is this: a faithful and complete summary of something we vividly remember.

And that’s boring.

What can you do? These other characters do have to be brought up to speed, right? Tommy can’t freak out over Chris cheating on him until Pat mentions having seen the two of them playing tongue-lacrosse in the sauna, am I right? Plus, the reader needs to see how Tommy reacts. Maybe the next thing that happens in the story depends on that reaction!

The difficulty lies not in the transmission of the narrative of the clown car collision. It’s the faithful and full disclosure that’s problematic. That’s what reduces us to feeling as though we are binge watching something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we’ve hit the Previously On section. Previously On is a useful refresher when you’re watching the show one hour at a time, at one-week intervals. But hey–if you just saw all this same stuff five minutes ago, all it’s good for is a bathroom break.

So. Techniques:

1. Summarize: We have the bearer of the news, and the audience. If the bearer really is going to tell the listener everything, try giving them one opening line. “Maybe you’d better sit down,” is a classic. Then just wrap it up: “I told her about Frankie’s meltdown the day before, working hard to remember every detail.”

2. Give them a reason to leave out a crucial bit: Why do they provide every detail? As yourself: who is this person, and might they have a reason to omit something? “He outlined what happened, telling her everything except the part about how he squeezed the mustard bottle so hard that they all went home covered in yellow stains. ”

3. Think of witness bias: does your gossip, the bearer of the tale, actually see what happened in the same terms as the other characters involved? Events worth spending not one but at least two scenes on better be a little intriguing. They’re hopefully dramatic, and preferably they’re life altering. If you put ten people in a room and show them life-altering, is there any chance their stories are going to line up perfectly? If Joy kills someone in self-defense in chapter two, how much more interesting is it if chapter three opens with, “Are you kidding? It was cold-blooded, premeditated murder,” Mallory declared.

4. Can they fight? Which brings us to: how many tellers are there, and are they in complete agreement about what happened? “Holy shit, Emily, Bobo the Clown totally swerved on purpose to hit us! Stop apologizing for him?”

What if they exaggerate? What if they lie?

5. Is the news-bearer clueless? What if your reporter saw the whole thing and had no idea why it was important? “Yuck yuck yuck, we saw Elizabeth nailing some dude, in the steam room, didn’t see his face… hey, buddy, you okay? You’re lookin’ kinda furtive all of a sudden. So, as I was saying…”

6. Why is this message getting passed along at all? Review the reasons why you’ve got this briefing onstage. Fictional characters are just as happy as we are to text the boring bits to their friends and loved ones. Is the bearer motivated by good will, the desire to gossip, or the need for solace or support? Have they been asked to spread the word? Are they hoping that speaking up will make them look good? Are they after revenge?

7. Does the recipient want to hear it? What if they’ve got their fingers in their ears and are screaming “La La La Get Out!!”

By now you can see the point I’m making: unless there is some kind of twist on the second telling of your clown car massacre, there’s no point in taking us all through it again.

Remember before you go into the scene that the thing we already know isn’t important. You are writing this passage because the character reactions matter, because someone is going to give inaccurate or incomplete or just-plain-wrong information, because new light is going to be shed on the events or characters involved, or because this conversation is going to trigger the next round of important character and plot developments.

Figure out what the important thing is. Craft the scene so the crucial bit is the one that receives the emphasis.

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*My Writing102 tag is a 2015 addition to this site – it’s meant to indicate essays for writers who aren’t entirely inexperienced. The Internet has a wealth of information for people just starting out, and less for those looking to develop next-level skills. In these essays, I’m trying to explore questions that might challenge people who can already write coherent, readable prose and have some idea how a story may be structured–people trying to get to the next level.

I welcome your feedback, as well as other suggestions for similar articles.