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.

Xmen, days of Boresville

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imageI will be churlish and vaguely spoilery here, just so you know.

My chief complaints are, in no order:

*Everyone was so terribly, tiresomely earnest. Except Quicksilver, who was hilarious and delightful and then not in the movie anymore. Dour dour dour. You have to assume the true purpose of the Sentinels was crushing humor everywhere. The mutant population simply became collateral damage. “Mr. President, someone’s about to get off a zinger in here…” ZAP! DIE!!

*I get that a major point of these films is that Professor X and his obvious slash interest are young and inexperienced. Not yet the men they will one day become. Yay, good message! We get better as we get older. But as starting points for growth go, this is really sad. What we get here is Doctor Whiny versus someone who ODed on Stupid Pills. I love Mystique, but the fact that she runs rings around Charles and Eric is hardly satisfying. If the two of them tried to pull off a doughnut run in this movie, they’d come home with one spilled and cooling hot chocolate, five bales of wheatgrass, and a half-eaten box of baby Cheerios. “Sorry,” they’d say. “We were about to pay for crullers and bear claws and then Magneto decided that the deep fryer guy was giving in to his fear and hatred of the other.”

*Serious Bechdel Fail, unless you count Mystique as Peter Dinklage talking to an unnamed clerical worker about her scarf.

*The Sentinels (presumably by design?) looked like a mash-up of the rampaging Tony suits in Iron Man 2 and the Guardian from Thor Primo. Why?

*Magneto. A hacker? In the Seventies? What? Using railroad ties? What? Were they made of fibre optic cable and laced with the spirit of Neo? I mean: Come on! They weren’t all, “ATTENTION MUTANTS: I HAVE METAL COOTIES! I MUST COMPLY!” No, they flew in formation. They obeyed his voice commands. Do Sentinels get Stockhold Syndrome? Why isn’t Philip K. Dick around to write us all the answer?

*For eff’s sake, show some guts, Marvel! If you want to give us Charles as an IV drug user imagery, go for it and damnwell make him a heroin addict.

I could go on just about forever. I’d not have taken a chance on this–I knew there was a high chance of cineloathing. But the reviews were glowing and people seemed to have liked it.

Jennifer Lawrence performed well. Raven’s journey was lovely and if they’d cut about 90 minutes of crap from all around it, there might have been an okay story in there. Charles has a couple quasi-believable epiphanies, though I’d rather they’d been facilitated by Wise Mature Logan rather than Future Charles. You sell yourself short, Future Wolverine.

This emperor is buck naked, folks. Two and a half hours of watching the kittens wrestle while I tumble-dried the bedspread they peed on yesterday would have been a better use of my time.

In which I QUILTBAG with @kellyoyo ! Eee!

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write memeI mentioned not long ago that I had sold “Queen of the Flies” to Michael Matheson’s QUILTBAG: START THE REVOLUTION anthology. Now Michael has released the TOC, which means I’m free to explain the comment I made about this one being special.

Why’s it special? Because my wife, Kelly Robson, has a story in it too. What’s more, it’s a stunning, scary, beautifully-written gut-wrencher of a piece called “Two Year Man.”

This will be our first appearance in an anthology together, so naturally I am very jazzed.

As you’ll see from the TOC, QUILTBAG will also have stories by Charlene Challenger, Leah Bobet, and E.L. Chen, to name three. It’s going to be entertaining and challenging, and it’ll be out early next year.

Between now and then, Michael Matheson is planning to attend Clarion West. If you’d like to help him get there, click here.

CHS Review at Behind the Lines and Back Again

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imageOnce again, I’m unabashedly posting one of my favorite bits, this one by reviewer Molly Wright, who says:

I really enjoyed this book, it had a taste of the humor/lightness of a young adult novel with the underlying messages and depth of a older book. I don’t know how it was light and deep at the same time, but maybe the author use a spell of some kind like Mary Poppins or Hermione Granger. It also had a wonderful magic system which combine some classic elements with the new.

The body count in my first book, Indigo Springs, is pretty low. By which I mean that perhaps a dozen people die in it, and only three of those are named characters who get it in the neck onstage. Nevertheless, it’s not a bubbly book. It opens after a magical-environmental disaster has turned much of Oregon into an enchanted, if litter-strewn, forest. Astrid Lethewood has lost her home, her freedom and just about everyone she loves. Will Forest, the police profiler tasked with finding out just how she got to that place, is struggling with the disappearance of his children.

Nobody’s real happy, you know?

In Blue Magic, the follow-up, the death toll is several orders of magnitude higher. I like to think the book has a happy ending, but you may have to squint to see it. (Do you agree? I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about the ending of Blue Magic with anyone.)

By chance, the stretch of time when I was working on that second book included some pretty rough seas. I lost a number of loved ones, and there were other things going on, things that enhanced that illusion we all get now and then, the one where Life, with a capital L, has chosen your ass as her personal scratching post.

When I set out to write Child of a Hidden Sea, one of my first priorities was to write a fun book, dammitall. Fun for readers, of course, but also for me. One whose point of view character was cheery and optimistic and someone I’d enjoy hanging out with even when her life was turning to crap. No matter what bleak happenstance I also packed into the story–mass extinctions, homicide, kids with abandonment issues, lost friends, a never-ending war with diplomatic red tape, debt, taxes, you name it–I wanted it to have lots of light notes. Froth, even. Bright skies, sandy beaches, and the occasional bit of silliness.

Did I succeed? Judge for yourself. Tor has posted the first chapter here. 

Minimal animals, the latest

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imageCinZo are about to lose their feral appellation, I think. We started giving them their wet food by hand a few days ago, and not surprisingly this has chilled them out considerably on the issue of whether we are big scary giants who will eat them. Petting them induces purring and they will snuggle for as long as thirty seconds at a time. (Hey, they’ve got important pouncing to get back to!)

They have also figured out the sandbox, as far as we can tell, and thus have the run of the apartment as of bedtime last night. Finally, the TV no longer terrifies them: I subjected them to three hours of The Life of Birds on the weekend.

They aren’t yet convinced that being sung to is a particularly good use of anyone’s time, but one short week after being pulled out from under a porch in Etobicoke, it’s all looking happy, secure and friendly.

Now the question is: can we get them to accept snuggly worship from our friends? Perhaps especially our Peter Watts shaped friends?

Child of a Hidden Sea – a free taste @tordotcom

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Tor has posted the first chapter of my new book here for your reading pleasure. It begins thusly:

Sinking.

Sophie Hansa had barely worked out that she was falling before she struck the surface of an unknown body of water.

First, there’d been a blast of wind. A tornado? Rushing air, pounding at her eardrums, had plucked her right off the ground. Howling, it had driven her upward, pinwheeling and helpless, over the rooftops of the houses and shops, carrying her up above the fog, in a cloud of grit and litter, trashcan lids, uprooted weeds, discarded heroin needles, and a couple very surprised rats.

Those of you who’ve read “Among the Silvering Herd,” and “The Ugly Woman of Castello di Putti,” might notice that the novel starts about a dozen years further on. Gale Feliachild is older, and Garland Parrish is no longer the first mate of Nightjar–he’s the captain. (Then again, chapter one doesn’t quite get us to Parrish, and Gale’s got a lot on her plate, including a near-fatal stab wound and a niece who overshares when stressed, so maybe that’s not obvious.)

I’m so excited to see this book making its way out to you all! If you have any questions or comments, throw them my way–either here or at the Tor site.

A couple of you have asked about things that inspire me, so I thought I’d mention that this trilogy owes a huge debt to the BBC Nature team and particularly the various series presented by Sir David Attenborough. The moth migration and resulting prey bonanza described in this chapter were inspired by any number of real-world natural events. Here’s one such event, from Life in the Undergrowth. It’s sardines, and not insects, but it’s amazing footage, the kind Sophie Hansa aspires to shoot one day. You can see the predators gathering, above and below, to take that bait ball apart.

The BBC videographers lavish resources on photodocumenting parts of the natural world I can only hope to visit one day, along with parts I’ll never see, either because they’re inaccessible or, sadly, likely to disappear in the not too distant future. I transmute their work into fiction. Inspiration, like everything, is an ecosystem of sorts.

Enjoy!