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.

Contact Me!

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photo by Laurie Grassi of Raincoast Books

photo by Laurie Grassi of Raincoast Books

I am all over the Internet, and can be found goofing around on Twitter, Pinterest and perhaps especially Instagram. I welcome comments, posts, reposts, likes, follows, shares and favorites. I’m always thrilled to meet like-minded people through such networks and feel fortunate to have such abundant opportunities to connect !

Please do contact me by e-mail if you have questions about my fiction, want to schedule an interview or appearance, or are curious about becoming one of my students… or just about anything else. Reach out! I am at Gmail, at alyx.dellamonica. 

My turnaround time on messages when I’m not under deadline is brisk; otherwise, it can stretch from a few days to a week.

 

This week’s #Buffyrewatch, last year’s stories

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SuperHeroes_BookpgeThis week’s Buffy essay is called “Looking for Blood in all the Wrong Places” and it’s about “Never Leave Me” and “Bring on the Night.”

My 2013 publications were all reprints: “Faces of Gemini” appeared in Claude Lalumiere’s Super Stories of Heroes & Villains and my squid story about the Battle of Hawaii, “The Sweet Spot” was in the Chizine anthology Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, edited by Sandra Kasturi. I wrote a lot of things, and sold several short pieces, but they haven’t come out yet. You’ll see them this year.

And, of course, I worked on the Hidden Sea Tales, the first of which, Child of a Hidden Sea, will be out June 24th.

Being the sentimental part of the #alyxkelly25 project

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There’s a line early in The Winslow Boy: “Let’s take the sentimental part of the project for granted,” it goes. It’s a dad’s way of saying to a young man, “I get you’re in love with my daughter, but let’s not go talking about all these feels of yours, all right?”

To which I say Fuck That! If I’m gonna make a big public fuss over my anniversary, let’s lead with emotion.

I fell irrevocably in love with my wife Kelly when I saw her dancing at a bagpipe funk concert sponsored by the Lethbridge Folk Festival, back in the late Eighties. I remember the moment. The thunderbolt. We’d been friends awhile, had gone to the concert together, but boom. Everything changed. And that night she slept over at my place and…

… and nothing happened. No romance, no heartfelt confessions. I was dating someone else, see.

(Which was a situation that went on, messily, for rather an embarrassingly long while. It took time for me to get my head out of Denialsville, otherwise known as my ass, and the rest of me out of the prior relationship.)

This thing K and I have, it is the billion dollar lottery win. It is the One True Love™. It is hearts and flowers; the glass slipper. It has the feel of fate, and tastes of the marrow-deep conviction that there is no other. All those schmaltzy “two hearts beating as one” lyrics and greeting cards may as well have been written for us.

And though it doesn’t feel anything but right, it’s easy to see from a distance that it’s weird, because I’m a pragmatic, tough-minded and generally rational being, with little patience for magical thinking. My head doesn’t take seriously the proposal that in a world filled with billions, each of us has one other half whom they might never actually meet. I’ve watched Tim Minchin’s lengthy, slightly NSFW, “If I Didn’t Have You” a hundred times because I love it. (Thanks, Linda C, for that!)

And my brain buys in, utterly. Perhaps especially the part of love being made more powerful by the trauma of shared existence.

Logic aside, I live the happily ever after implied in every Austen novel and romantic comedy. The right person came along for me, the One. And that, my friends, is that. I love Kelly with a passion that borders on worship.

I am incredibly, unbelievably fortunate.

Silver? Pah! 25th Anniversary gets a hashtag! #alyxkelly25

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So our very first plan for our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary–this’d be the not-legal wedding, obviously, though our tenth legal anniversary was this past August–was to spend a couple weeks in Mexico.

That morphed into an intention to go to a monkey-infested surf resort in Nicaragua that had yoga every morning.
And that turned into Texas, then Nicaragua.

And then, as it turned out we were moving to Toronto, it devolved and shifted, until finally what we have is a few days off work, a fancy meal out, and tickets to see a musical, London Road, about a serial killer in England.

On Saturday, however, we decided that on top of the above plan, we were going to drag the whole Internet into the racket, by going on and on and happily on about the whole thing. Twenty five years! OMG, 25! We’ve been hitched since 1989, folks! Wow!

I warn you now to expect very little from this blog, the Instagram feed, and Facebook between now and the 21st. There may be posts about everything from true love, good luck, and anniversaries past to the legal wedding. There may be a logo. A theme song. We’re seriously considering approaching random strangers on the street and asking them to take (heavily bundled in our winter-clothes) pictures of us.

Join the fun in any fashion you like, or cover your ears and know it’ll be over soon enough.

Edited to add: I’m not sure why the photo links aren’t working. I’ll fix it, promise!

2014, I’m watching you….

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I don’t go in much for New Year’s Resolutions, but I said to Kelly a few days ago, and only half-jokingly: “I’m gonna make a pact with the invisible sky fairy. Nobody dies on us this year, and we’ll start working on being less morbid.”

Because there have been a lot of funerals for us, since 2005, and damn but I’m tired. Though as you may have noticed, I find cemeteries pretty.

Since then, I’ve got an e-mail that Grandma’s husband Bert’s doing not so well, and one of K’s cousins is in hospital with pneumonia. Maybe I’ll have to swing the other way and get myself a Morticia gown. And nine extra inches of height in the legs to pull it off.