Ada Maria Soto's Blog, page 12

Six Sentence Sunday (Whistle Blowing) 2

For Six Sentence Sunday. This is from Whistle Blowing which will be coming soon, for free, as part of the Love is Always Write anthology. It’s a story about family loyalty, corporate greed, government corruption, and who you trust when you can’t trust anyone.

Sebastian has found Daren on the floor of the men’s room begging not to be taken to a hospital because people were trying to kill him. Lucky for him Sebastian was a medic in the Navy.

Daren twitched and jerked in pain, but Sebastian worked quickly. As he worked, he looked over the bloody mess that was this boy and started thinking about all the stuff he wished he had at his disposal. A c-collar, a back board, pressure bandages, latex gloves. Especially gloves. Unfortunately the only latex he had on him was in the form of a pre-lubed condom. Not helpful in this situation.

Death Is A Lonely Business: The Bradbury Novel that Told Me I Could Maybe Write, and No One Else Seems to Have Read or at Least Mentioned Recently

In the past few days the stories of Bradbury’s influence have been coming fast and thick from writers, readers, innovators, and politicians. He is part of the great group subconscious of the world, that is not in doubt. And people have been talking about his books of course, and how those books influenced their lives. Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes. All the big names in his cannon.

I honestly can’t say when I read my first Bradbury story. It was probably something from The Martian Chronicles, and I was probably seven or eight. Young enough not to know that Mars didn’t really have ancient canals. Young enough to be horribly disappointed when the pictures from the surface of Mars came back without towering cities of crystal. I read all his stories of the red world. I think my favorites actually came from The Illustrated Man. The first short film script I ever wrote was a direct homage to those stories.

But for as much as those books inspired imaginations across the world only one truly changed my thoughts on writing and possibly slid the idea that I could write subtly into the back of my mind.

When I was perhaps thirteen, maybe fourteen (we were already in the new house, I remember that), my father returned from an expedition to a used bookstore with a hardbound book baring the title Death is a Lonely Business by one of my favorite authors. From the cover glass eyes stared at me, and inside it had a fake Bradbury signature made out to someone I didn’t know. My father told me it wasn’t his usual stuff. It was a murder mystery. My father has always been one for the mysteries and thrillers. His bookshelf was always lined with Dashiell Hammett, John le Carré, and Arthur Conan Doyle. He could recite every word of Bogart’s Maltese Falcon. Being antisocial, insomniatic, and willing to read anything I finished the book in one night.

It opened with an unnamed young writer, obviously some form of Bradbury himself, riding the old Red Line trolley through a bleak, rain drenched, Venice California in 1949. As he rides through the pounding rain a drunk comes into the car and sits behind the young writer. The drunk moans and mumbles and says those words. “Death is a Lonely Business.”

This opening I understood. I’m an urban child. I grew up with the BART train rolling by less than a block from my bedroom window. I knew about drunks on trains and buses late at night. I knew just as the author did to hold still, they are attracted to movement. Don’t make eye contact, in case they take it as an invitation. Don’t look, in case you see something you don’t want to. But there are two things you can’t block out, the sound and the smell. Drunken curses to people who aren’t there. Schizophrenic rants to God, with no obvious replies coming. And the smell of beer, piss, vomit, and dirt. The knowledge that death would probably smell better. All this I understood, whereas Bradbury’s late autumn, Midwest, small town days were as foreign to me as the canals of Mars. And I had greater belief in his Martians than in parents who told their children to go and play and not come back until dark.

Within a couple of pages of the drunken encounter Bradbury gives up the first body. Someone shoved into a lion cage that was half submerged in scummy canal water.

As accidents occur, and people die of fright, or age, the unnamed writer with his writers imagination believes they are victims of murder. And as he tries to bang out little tales of terror that will net him 40 dollars a sale he also collects people around him, and around the newly dead, living on the crumbling Venice pleasure pier for his stories. Each person Bradbury snatches up and gives to us in a handful of words, in that lovely impressionistic style he has. Elmo Crumley, the detective who has grown his own Garden of Eden and has a half-finished novel in his desk drawer. Constance Rattigan, the silent movie star who keeps vampire hours and swims in the ocean with the seals and sharks. And Fannie Florianna, the 400 pound soprano and queen of an old tenement house.

Of course the killer is collecting the same people for different reasons and calling them the Lonelies.

I have always loved the murder mystery especially in the Hammett style, but it was Bradbury speaking as a writer that worked its way inside my brain. There were words to himself as a struggling young man. He was comfortably into his 60’s and could tell himself, through literary time travel, that things would work out if he could survive those fogy impoverished years. There was also the advice to Crumley, and every other soul with a day job and a half-finished novel. The words could and would come if you kept at it, if you really wanted it. For some it was easier, others harder, but the words were there. If you weren’t one of the Lonelies and on the list of some late night killer. But the most important thing for me was the Talking Box.

I did a final sermon on Miss Birdsong, and a page about the glass eyes, and took all these pages and put them in my Talking Box. That was the box I kept by my typewriter where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings to tell me where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. I lay half-asleep, listening, and then got up and went to help them, with my typewriter, to go where they most needed to go to do some special wild thing; so my stories got written. Sometimes it was a dog that needed to dig a graveyard. Sometimes it was a time machine that had to go backward. Sometimes it was a man with green wings who had to fly at night lest he be seen. Sometimes it was me, missing Peg in my tombstone bed.

I didn’t know I wanted to write when I read this book. I didn’t know if I wanted to do anything except be left alone in my fortress of books with my collection of broken things. But the idea of the Talking Box stuck in my head. The idea that you didn’t need a full idea. That stories and novels didn’t erupt fully formed in the minds of even the greats. That the stories I loved could be stitched together out of bits and pieces of ideas and people who brushed against your life. As someone who wouldn’t throw out puzzles with missing pieces and collected my mother’s broken crystal this idea appealed.

When I finally got to university I was studying theatre. I was still clinging to the grand illusion that I could act, or maybe direct (I still know I can direct), but the year before I had started writing bits of plays for drama class and collecting descriptions of odd people I knew. It wasn’t long before I got tired of having my history essays scrambled in with my half formed plays and bits of angst ridden fanfic. Being a modern child I liked a tidy file structure so I created a new file, named it My Writing and dumped everything original in there. By the next day it was My Original Work. By day three the file was called Talking Box. It still is. In every computer I’ve ever owned my copy of Word opens automatically to my Talking Box. The shortcut sits on my desktop. And while it contains some completed works it is also filed with snippets, random pages from half formed novels, character sketches. There are even some completely blank documents that just have a title that I’m sure meant something brilliant at the time I created them.

So out of this certainly egotistical, adolescent whim of file naming for the last thirteen years every time I have sat down to write for at least a second Bradbury leaps into my mind. When I stare at blank pages trying to form new worlds his golden eyed Martians stare back at me. When I have good days and my fingers are flying over the keys with quite clicks faster than I can think I have an image of an ‘unoiled 1934 Underwood Standard typewriter… as big as a player piano and as loud as wooden clogs on a carpetless floor’. That typewriter produced story after amazing story and I pray to capture just a drop of the wonder that spilled from that machine. And on days when nothing comes and the curser blinks at me on a white page, like Bradbury’s unnamed young writer, I pull someone from the depths of my Talking Box and do my best to figure out where they want to go and what they need to do.

Six Sentence Sunday (Whistle Blowing) 1

For Six Sentence Sunday. This is from Whistle Blowing which will be coming soon, for free, as part of the Love is Always Write anthology. It’s a story about family loyalty, corporate greed, government corruption, and who you trust when you can’t trust anyone.

This is Sebastian getting his first glimpse of the kid who is going to turn his life upside down.

Sebastian sipped his glass of whisky; he’d been nursing it for close to half an hour. The ice cube had long since melted and the drink had gone warm, but he didn’t want to get drunk and until his new job started, he couldn’t really afford it. However, he had once been told that he had the looks for sipping whiskey, dark hair and eyes, and just a little rough around the edges.

A young man stepped into the bar, the noise and lights of the nighttime city chasing him in. Sebastian looked the kid over, and he did look like a kid, with tight jeans, a suede jacket, and spiked bleached hair. Even in the dim light, he could make out perfect, pale skin and a fine-boned profile.

Things That Aren’t Really That Important in the Grand Scheme of Things

I’ve spent the last week trying to compose a new blog post with minimal luck. I tried to write about love but I found I didn’t have much to say there. I started writing about gender rolls but realized it was too big a topic, and had too much potential for argument for someone just starting out as a writer and trying to build a fan base. I tried to write something about my literary influences except most of the writers I truly admire write for television. I even tried putting together a few words for Memorial Day but they just sounded pedestrian and not half as good as what I wrote for ANZAC Day. I’ve got degrees in theatre and film so I never want to analyze or write reviews of anything ever again. I could write a postmortem on my feelings, positive and negative, towards Eden Springs, but I think I’ll wait until a few more people buy it.

So…. Fuck it.

I’m not Hemingway. I have very few illusions about what I write so why get all pretentious here. I’m the one who used to quote Bruckheimer films before scrip writing class just to make everyone cringe. So, here we go. This is what is in my head right now.

Blues (Super Rugby) – WTF! Pat Lam needs to get his head fucking examined! It’s like he’s trying to lose. He goes up against the Highlanders with three of his All Blacks on the bench and doesn’t take them out until the second half. Once they are out they start scoring all over the place but not before it’s too fucking late. Okay, Weepu isn’t in great shape but that’s no reason to dump Nonu on the bench as well. Seriously! I vote for John Kirwan for our new coach. He’s a guy who know how to roll with the punches.

Chennai Super Kings (Cricket IPL 20Twenty) – Oh boys. You were so close. One game away from a championship hat trick. What happened? You need at least 200 on the board in that kind of game and what the hell happened to the bowling that had been pristine all season? You let them get their eye in. You let them creep up on you through the middle innings. You now have one year to figure out what went wrong and fix it.

Black Caps (International Cricket) – Head!Desk Forget Bring Back Buck let’s try Bring Back Vettori. If his IPL season is anything to go on he could use more practice in the short form and dear good do we need him as a middle order batsman.

Oakland Athletics (Baseball) – I’m an East Bay girl. I’m loyal. I always will be. Even if they are in a rebuilding phase. And have been for the last 20 years.

San Jose Sharks (Ice Hockey) – *sigh* (I’ll just leave it at that)

All Blacks (International Rugby) – Oh I’m keeping my fingers crossed. For Steve Hansen’s sake if nothing else. After the outcome of the Ireland v. Wales World Cup match the Irish are going to be coming back here with something to prove. Teams have a habit of sucking a bit after winning a World Cup. Some of our top players are injured, out of shape, or still just a little burned out from the Cup. Hansen is going to have to break in fresh meat while trying to prove he can fill Graham Henry’s shoes. I really hope he manages it.

In short this hasn’t been a good year for any sporting team I support.

For my next blog post I’ll try to write something about love, or sex, or art, or religion, or something that makes it look like I actually earned that Masters Degree hanging on my wall. But for now the part of me who will yell at players on the TV needed to get that all out.

If anyone else would like to bitch (within polite reason) about a favorite team having a suck season feel free to use the comment section.

Six Sentence Sunday (Eden Springs) 6

For Six Sentence Sunday a snip of my first major publication, Eden Springs, now for sale (and slightly discounted) through Dreamspinner Press

Here Aaron is given an exotic treat as part of a thank you for a job well done.

He took a sip and found it more than fine. The taste of warm jasmine filled his mouth and rolled down his throat. He had almost no memories of his grandmother, except a hazy image of her sipping tea. She had poured some into small chipped cup and given it to him. He remembered the warmth of the tea slipping down his throat and the smell of jasmine more clearly than his grandmother’s face. He couldn’t have been more than four.

My First Release Day.

So Amazingly Excited!

In the boomtown of Eden Springs, someone is spilling the blood of children. Desperate, the sheriff calls in ex-Union scout Aaron Byrne to stop the killers. For the lawman for hire, it’s just another job–until he meets Jonah Mann, the town’s Oxford-trained astronomer-cum-schoolteacher.

Aaron never stays in one place for long, but a few stolen glances from the eccentric professor begin to test his resolve to move along once the job is done. Now a telescope, a whorehouse bathtub, and a cup of Chinese tea could change Aaron’s own stars forever.

Basically it’s a story about cowboys and nerds. Who doesn't love Cowyboys and Nerds?

Eden Springs

Eden Springs – My First Novella

Here it is!

Today’s the day!

My first ever release!



Eden Springs – Available through Dreamspinner Press. $3.99USD

In the boomtown of Eden Springs, someone is spilling the blood of children. Desperate, the sheriff calls in ex-Union scout Aaron Byrne to stop the killers. For the lawman for hire, it’s just another job–until he meets Jonah Mann, the town’s Oxford-trained astronomer-cum-schoolteacher.

Aaron never stays in one place for long, but a few stolen glances from the eccentric professor begin to test his resolve to move along once the job is done. Now a telescope, a whorehouse bathtub, and a cup of Chinese tea could change Aaron’s own stars forever.

Basically it’s a story about cowboys and nerds.

It’s hard to explain just how excited I am about this. It (hopefully) will mark a big change in the direction of my life. And I want to thank in advance anyone who buys it and a really big thanks to everyone who enjoys it.

Six Sentence Sunday (Eden Springs) 5

For this week’s Six Sentence Sunday I give you one more taste of Eden Springs. A story of sex, violence and astronomy in the old west. (Or Cowboys and Nerds as I like to think of it.) Coming on MAY 23 from Dreamspinner Press.

In this bit Jonah is telling Aaron how he got a scar usually hidden under his fancy clothes. He might be leaving out a few details.

“I had a friend who had a fondness for the opium pipe. He’d bring me along for protection while he floated away. One day he actually needed it.” Aaron noted the hint of darkness in Jonah’s voice and the way his eyes darted away. Aaron didn’t push. All men had a bit of darkness and a few secrets.”

Six Sentence Sunday (Eden Springs) 4 WITH COVER ART!

For Six Sentence Sunday another little tease of my upcoming novella Eden Springs. Coming soon from Dreamspinner Press. This is part of a scene where Jonah is explain to Aaron what a highly educated astronomer is doing teaching school in Eden Springs. Oh and I also have COVER ART!!!!!



“When his body washed up, I took off his shoes and coat, rolled up his trouser legs, so if anyone asked, I could say he was wading when a wave pulled him under.” Jonah became silent again. Aaron didn’t push. “When my brother came to me after the war and told me he was going West, he had that same look in his eyes that Ifan had when he said, ‘Let’s go to the seaside.’”

“So you decided to go West with him.”

“You should have seen the look on his face when I told him.”

UPDATE: I now have a release date! Eden Springs will be available starting May 30 for $3.99 from Dreamspinner Press.

Six Sentence Sunday (Eden Springs) 3

Presenting my weekly offering to Six Sentence Sunday. Here are some lines from my western novella Eden Springs, a story of violence, sex, and astronomy in the old west. I just sent back my galley proof edits, so this is getting closer and closer. It will come curtsey of Dreamspinner Press.

Aaron watched the stars twinkle at him. He sought out the constellations he knew. He wondered how many stars that he couldn’t see were just between Orion’s shoulders. He looked back at the dark hills, hiding a couple of murdering bastards who were proving as difficult to find as an invisible star. He squinted at them. Even in the dark he could make out where the rocky tree line was.