Ada Maria Soto's Blog, page 2

Arthur, Martin, and Me: Reflections on the Release of Agents of Winter

About eleven years ago I started writing what I thought would be a bog-standard MM interoffice romance. A couple of analysts that work for an unidentified three letter government agency meet at work, have some adventures, fall in love, have sex, HEA, the end. Instead, the characters began to take on lives of their own and argue for their own lives in ways no other characters ever had. For one, they kept saying no to sex. They also refused to reach out to supporting characters, or to even speak to each other more than a few words at a time.

I honestly can’t tell you how many revisions it took for the characters to be happy with how I wrote them. Six years for 35 thousand words and it was like nothing I’d ever written before, and I figured never would again.

I called it The Agency and submitted it to my publisher in February of 2017. In March I got a rejection letter. I went back and looked it up again and found this darling line.

“Our team felt that the romance came out of nowhere and that there wasn’t any physical romance. This would be have been understandable had one or both of the main characters identified as asexual, but our readers still wanted that heart pounding, steamy chemistry between the main characters.”

Because a character needs to use the actual defining word before it counts, and they missed the bit where Arthur does identify as demisexual (and yes, I copied and pasted directly from the email so that weird writing in the second sentence is all them).  You can say that I was a little miffed and took it pretty hard. I tried a couple other publishers but I got more along the lines of ‘we’re not sure if this is a romance’, or ‘we like it but it doesn’t work with our current catalogue’.

Prior to becoming a writer, I had one of the less glamorous jobs in the broadcast area of New Zealand Television. During that job I learned a lot of random things, like you can’t buy the broadcast rights for just one TV show, they get sold in bundles, so if you want buy something like Homeland to air in primetime with rights for three repeats, you also have to buy Tarra Nova and you are stuck with it forever. After several rejection letters I felt like maybe I had made a Tarra Nova, something that someone obviously put a lot of time and effort into but only got 13 episodes.

So, what do I do with a Tarra Nova? Well, if you don’t put a show to air, it stays a red line on the ledger. To erase that red line, you have to slot it in after Nightline but before the infomercials. The only advertisers are New Zealand government PSAs and Crown Forklifts, but the line is no longer red.

While The Agency was getting rejected Tactical Submission was also getting rejected because, according to one agent “I’m finding BDSM romance an exceptionally tough sell at the moment.” Other places were giving me various versions on ‘we think the market is about to drop out’. So that made two red lines.

I took a very deep breath and decided to self-publish The Agency (To be renamed His Quiet Agent). I honestly thought no one would read it. I did it in order to teach myself the steps. As far as I was aware I had no fans, no following, no one who would be interested in this little novella that some people were telling me wasn’t even a romance. I had nothing to lose and if I made a couple of bucks, cool.

So, I released it, and a couple people bought it, but basically nothing happened for a month. And then a review showed up on Queer Books Unbound and the ball started rolling. For the last five years it’s been my consistent best seller with the most reviews and the most direct feedback.

Authors are told to never read their reviews. I’m not that strong. Or maybe I’m just emotionally masochistic. I read my reviews. Not all of them but sometimes I just need to know what my readers think I’m doing right or maybe doing wrong. The reviews the first year or so all talked about it being an asexual/demisexual romance. I don’t think there were a lot on the market then. In the last few years though I saw it start to crop up on lists and tagged as neurodivergent MC.

This I sort of blinked at the first few times. I even got one very long email talking about how Martin was so obviously autistic and why didn’t I just state it outright. I filed this away as people reading what they want into characters. I hadn’t intended to write asexual characters, and I also hadn’t considered that Martin might be read as having ASD. In my head he was just a guy who liked routine and wasn’t comfortable socializing, just like a lot of people I know and grew up with. There were also several reviews that declared Arthur neurodivergent because he has a hard time connecting with the other agents and is weirded out by ficus trees. I read those and thought ‘look it, it’s hard to make friends as an adult, especially at work, and have you ever seen a ficus tree, they are weird’. If any of the characters represented a good amount of me in them it was Arthur, and aside from the dyslexia and bipolar disorder and fibromyalgia I’m not neurodivergent.

Jump to just before my 40th birthday and I’m not doing well. Not because I’m turning 40 but because long Covid has screwed my brain chemistry (more). I go back to therapy (a new one because my old therapist retired) and she asks me to research Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Sure, no problem. While I’m researching, I keep coming across these blog posts by women in their 30’s who have just been diagnosed with ADHD. The first one has stuff that sounds familiar, as does the second and third. I go back to my therapist with a whole stack of links and printouts and she says ‘yes, I think you have ADHD, let’s get you to a psychiatrist for medication’.

For the record, after starting Ritalin, I finished the first draft of Agents of Winter in six months, mostly hand written. I will always be angry thinking about what I could have done if I was diagnosed at nine instead of thirty-nine because all the signs were there.

As I worked on Agents of Winter a few things happened. One is that as I reread His Quiet Agent I kept finding more and more of Arthur’s little ‘quirks’ that I now recognized as my quirks. Particularly ones that are linked to the ADHD. So yeah, maybe I did write Arthur as neurodivergent without realizing it.

And then there was Martin. Martin who spent the last book hardly talking, barely moving even, and now he wanted more but with more came hard things like food with strange textures, migraines from blinking Christmas lights, and a certain level of social expectations like remembering to shake hands.

It wasn’t while writing, or even rewriting, or on the third or fourth edit, but rather a final technical approval when I was making sure every comma was in place when my mind finely clicked and went ‘oh’. I thought about how much I hate lattes because the foam makes me feel like I’m choking on phlegm. I thought about how fast blinking Christmas lights are like the visible version of nails on a chalk board. I remembered all the times I had panicked realizing that I was expected to shake hands and suddenly wondering if it was obvious that I had forgotten about that for a second and if I had come across weird or standoffish because of it.

So maybe, possibly, some of those reviews were telling me a little more about myself than I had ever considered. And to top it off my therapist is on vacation so I can’t even talk to her about it.

Agents of Winter is dedicated to all of us who forget that handshakes are a thing until there is an empty hand in front of us and an awkward silence.

My Mother and the Thing That’s Happening Now

The last story I told you of my mother was about a year and
a half ago.  She had finished her attempt
at hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and had been called up to do search and retrieval
after a particularly vicious set of wild fires.

As I’d mentioned before, at an age when many are looking at retirement, she had been downsized from her tech writing job.  Instead of scrambling for a new job she applied for unemployment then took one of those What You Should Do When You Grow Up tests that they usually give to high school students.  After thirty years of tech writing she wanted a change.  The test spat out that she should be a nurse.  She already had her EMT and Paramedic licences and had been helping to teach Red Cross classes for years.  Honestly nursing was a good fit and probably something she would have been happy to do most of her life except she is of that generation of 70’s feminist that pushed back against anything that was labelled “women’s” work.  She refused to learn to type in high school so she could never get a job as a secretary (and I assure you that is the most on brand story I could tell you about her).  Instead she was a security officer and drove a forklift for a while.

There have been a couple more waves of feminism since then and she’s now in the second half of her 60’s and cares a bit less about what people think of her job so she decided to retrain as a nurse.  Since nursing is in short supply, she was able to find a government paid for program that squeezes a two-year nursing degree into one year.  Ninety credits in one year.  There were twenty-page papers due the day after thanksgiving. They got three days off at Christmas.

Two days ago she took her final exam.  The last month of lectures had all been done
online and the exam was given using a program that lets a proctor look at your
computer screen and stare at you through your laptop camera.  She got an 1190 final score.  She needed 850 to pass.  4.0 gpa. 
She is literally twice the age of the next oldest student and the only
person who did better was 19.  She still
has to take the national tests in a month but she can get an interim licence and
start work now.

She is in the second half of her sixties, my dad is diabetic
with bad lungs, and she’s about to start a nursing career in the middle of a
fucking pandemic.  And she’ll do it.  She hasn’t said she will but I know her.  There are people who need help and she is
incapable of not helping.

Bowerbirds Re-Release

In all the madness of the world I forgot to mention that Bowerbirds has been re-released. It has an extra epilogue of about a thousand words.  If you bought the first edition send me a copy of the receipt and I’ll send you an updated copy. 

It’s been a strange project going back and reworking these
books.  It’s been like looking into amber
and seeing a frozen piece of who I was and what my world was like when I was
writing.  The me scribbling in a notebook
with time to kill on the nightshift seems a million years away from the me
trying to find a few minutes of privacy while climbing the walls six weeks into
lockdown.

Anyway, I hope you get a chance to either read Empty Nests and Bowerbirds for the first time or enjoy it as a comfort read in these trying times.

Two very different men have a chance at happiness, but only if they can let go of their painful pasts and allow love to take precedence. After spending his teens and twenties raising his son, James Maron is now dating Gabriel Juarez, the wealthy and sophisticated CFO of the TechPrim technology empire. But after a life of proudly holding his head above the poverty line with the ethos of work, priorities, responsibility, and thrift, he is not looking for a Sugar Daddy, he does not need to be rescued, and Gabe’s wealth is as terrifying as feeling love for the first time. Gabe has never been good at balancing his high-pressure job with his relationships. Money usually clears most of the bumps, and when a boyfriend walks away, Gabe figures it’s for a good reason. But James isn’t like other boyfriends. He doesn’t want Gabe’s money for one, and if Gabe wants to keep his relationship together, he will have to finally face the ghosts of his own past and reconsider his priorities.

Empty Nests Re-Release and General Life Update (Notes from the great NZ lockdown 2020!)

Hello Everyone!

How’s everyone holding up out there?  If you’re like me you have suddenly become a
home-schooling house spouse with zero productivity outside of keeping the kid
from gnawing through the fence in an escape attempt. Maybe you are stuck at
home with only your own thoughts and are thinking about finally writing that
book in your head. (Go For It!) Maybe you’re hard core working from home and
have the whole video conferencing Power Suit on top, jammies on the bottom
thing going. Or maybe you are in the health care trenches in which case PLEASE
do all you can to take care of yourself.  

In an attempt to keep the child amused, fed, and educated we have made bread, pickles, and cheese. 

I also managed, in the post bed time pre collapse hours, to re-release Empty Nests. There were some hiccups and it isn’t up in as many stores as usual yet because the humans behind a lot of automated systems aren’t exactly at their best (and who can blame them). Though that said the ISBN office of the National Library of New Zealand are the fastest, nicest, and most efficient government employees ever. 

I know some of you have already read Empty Nests. I’ve made some edits that basically fall under the category of ‘I was a baby writer and not as aware of certain things as I should have been so made some baby writer mistakes that I’ve gotten called out on over the years and am only now able to fix’.  If you’ve purchased a digital copy at some point over the years send me a copy of the receipt and I’ll send you an updated file.  I know there is a chance I never got the royalties for that original sale because Dreamspinner still owes me money, but if you’re reading this it means you’ve probably bought my other books which I did get paid for and you’ll probably buy my new books in the future so let’s just call this an act of good faith.

If you haven’t read it before and get to the end and wonder
where the sequel is, give me a week to get Bowerbirds up.  I have a very complex blanket fort taking
priority. (And did I mention my french press broke this morning?)

A quick note on the paperback, you’ll see two available on the Amazon.  Despite getting my rights back in July and asking a few times for it to come down the Dreamspinner print is still available.  I’ll need to go through the whole Amazon copyright infringement process to get it taken down and I just don’t have the time right now. Pick up the slightly cheaper one from Rookery Press. Actually, don’t. Not for a few months at least.  There are Amazon warehouse workers testing positive for Germs and I can not explain how much I would like to not sell through that company but that’s where 95% of you shop (I’ve got the numbers to prove it) and I’d rather none of you get sick from an overworked picker coughing at the wrong moment into a box.

So that’s the News from the Great New Zealand Lockdown of
2020.

Stay safe out there everybody.

Ada

Neither James nor Gabe has ever had a real relationship. They might make a connection if they can get past their differences–and their fears.

At age fourteen, James Maron decided to prove he wasn’t gay despite vast evidence to the contrary. Now at thirty-two, he’s getting ready to send his son to college and wondering what he’s supposed to do next. Outside his son, his life consists of an IT job he hates and watching telenovelas with the women in his apartment building.

Gabriel Juarez is the CFO of a technology giant. He has looks, charm, fantastic wealth, a workaholic personality, and a string of boyfriends who only stick around because he’s too busy to tell them to leave.

A bad laptop/projector interface causes James and Gabe’s paths to cross. Friends, family, and coworkers jump to match Gabe with a nice guy, and James with anyone. But are they too different? Everyone will have to tread very carefully to keep things from ending before they start.

My Mother and the California Fire Season

When I was telling the story of my mother and the Pacific Crest Trail, I mentioned that one of the things she did upon becoming a grandmother was to join the County Volunteer Search and Rescue team. Some might have found this odd but after 13 years as a Camp Fire Girl and another 18 years as a group leader she (probably unconsciously) lives her life by the laws of Camp Fire*, the second of which is Give Service. To help people and the community actually makes her happy.

After her beginning training her very first call out was to find a teen girl who had gone missing in the very same state park where she would take my group camping every other weekend. The girl was found in the morning just fine and had probably been hiding, afraid of getting into trouble once she realized a search party had been called.

My mom has continued her training over the last five years, rising up through the levels, pushing herself through wilderness evaluations that take out people half her age. All this despite the fact that most of her callouts are for old people with dementia who have wandered away from home and tried to catch buses to places that no longer exist.

Last Monday she texted me to say that she’d been called out to Butte county for search and recovery. She’d be leaving at two in the morning and she’d message me when she got back. I noted it was search and recovery, not search and rescue. We’d spent the last few years sure this would happen at some point.

If you watch the videos on the New York Times site or the Washington Post you might have seen her, one of a group dressed in head to toe white hazmat suits, poking through ash and rubble that was hardly higher than their ankles.

She was only up there for two days. That was as long as it was considered “safe”. We talked a bit when she got home. Just a bit. Normally she is more than willing to talk about learning to find shell casings in grassy crime scenes, or the autopsy she got to witness.

She said it reminded her of the pictures from Nagasaki after the bomb. Everything flattened to ash and the occasional bit of melted, twisted, metal. Her team was assigned a forensic anthropologist who could tell the difference between shattered rock and bone. And human bone from animal. She said there were no bodies to find, just bits of bone in the ash. She kept mentioning the toilets. They went house to house and would check the bathrooms, since that’s where people hide in fires. She kept mentioning that there were never any toilets. The fire had burned so hot even the thick porcelain was reduced to nothing.

After two days the team was put through a full decontamination, because apparently the ash is carcinogenic and the chemicals can seep through the skin. Another team was brought up to take their place and there will be another after that. The ground is still to hot and the air too bad to bring in dogs to work the scene. The scene being an entire city.

I had a video call with her the next day, mostly so she could talk with her granddaughter about school sports day and the upcoming dance recital.

Her lips were dry and cracked and I could tell, even on the little phone screen, that they had been bleeding. She looked tired, and older that she is. My dad thinks she has a little PTSD going.

They’re both in Vegas right now at a time share avoiding the smoke and working on their NaNoWriMo projects. My dad is writing at YA comic fantasy with a talking horse. My Mom is writing a thriller where a wild fire is a key plot point. I wonder if that’s going to change.

~

*The Laws of Camp Fire (as I remember them)

Seek Beauty

Give Service

Pursue Knowledge

Be Trustworthy

Hold on to Health

Glorify Work

Be Happy

Merlin in the Library – RELEASE DAY

When I finished His Quiet Agent I didn’t think anyone would read it let alone demand more.

Here’s more. Four thousand words from Martin’s POV available at Amazon and just about Everywhere Else.

 

Agent Martin Grove is in pain every minute of the day while his wounds slowly heal. As soon as one injury starts to fade another that was hidden presents itself, but despite that Martin is, above all, a man who appreciates routine. For him that means ‘Merlin’ must return to the regularly scheduled Saturday Children’s’ Story Hour at the library. He’s been absent for too long and his body is still a technicolor canvas of physical damage, but as long as he has his Arthur by his side, he just might make it.

Mom vs. the PCT: UPDATE

Since some people have been asking here is an update on my mother’s attempt to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.

After a couple of weeks resting up from a twisted rib and taking a practice hike through the East Bay Hills she got a lift back up to the trail. Not at the exact point where she left off but a bit further north at a lower altitude. Her first day back on the trail it was hot. 95F/35C. The next day it was hotter. 100F/38C. On the third day when it was hotter still she sat down and put her feet in a cool running stream. At which point she decided she wasn’t suicidal and didn’t want to die of hyperthermia.

She got off the trail the next day a bit east of Belden and, ignoring all the things she told my sister and I as teenagers, stuck out her thumb. She got a lift a hundred miles to Sacramento. From there she caught Amtrak from Sacramento to the Bay Area, then walked the five miles from the train station to home. Once there she knocked on the door and scared the crap out of my dad.

The following weekend she and my dad drove to her resupply stop where there was a bunch of stuff waiting and gave it to people who were still trying to make the hike.

I think she would like to go back onto the trail however the area is still locked in heat and covered in smoke, if not actively on fire. Conditions are not likely it improve before the hiking window closes.

So, final score.

Pacific Crest Trail:1

Climate Change:1

Mom:0

However, I know my mom. Stay tuned for more wacky adventures.

My Mother vs the Pacific Crest Trail

I’ve talked about my mother a few times on this blog. She’s an interesting person. She has the personality of someone who should be in the history books like Sally Ride or Amelia Earhart, but that personality has been stuck in the life of a Silicon Valley tech writer for the majority of her life. She’s been the primary income provider for the family, spent 22 years leading Camp Fire groups, put two kids through college (and one through grad school), volunteered with the Red Cross whenever she could, and has generally spent her life as a Good Person. Not always an easy person but a good one.

Five years ago, when she found out she was going to become a grandmother (after many years of nagging) she decided to take up mountain biking, get her EMT certifications, and join the county’s volunteer wilderness search and rescue. The family took a very ‘Mom is Mom’ approach to all this because we’re talking about a woman who once literally charged a bear yelling ‘shoo bear’ when we were camping.

There is no point in telling her no.

Last November she got word that her writing job of almost twenty years was being offshored to a country where writers are cheaper and English isn’t the primary language. She’d felt it coming but it was still a blow.

Most people, especially ones with spouses who have complex medical needs requiring good health insurance, would be scrambling to have the next job lined up. And she did make some phone calls and have some coffee meetings with people she had worked with and managed in the past who were willing to hook her up with work, but my mom, being the person that she is, decided instead to take a Gap Year. She also decided that at the age of sixty-[redacted] she was going to take three months to hike a section of the Pacific Crest Trail. Something she has never come close to doing before.*

For those who don’t know about Great Walks this is like deciding one morning that your new hobby is going to be mountain climbing and that you’re going to start with a middle chunck of Everest.

Now, when people lose jobs they talk a lot of shit about what they’re going to do next but 99% just go and find a new job, often a lot like their old one. Not my mom.

On June 11th, six months into her gap year, starting at Tuolumne Meadows, with the ultimate goal of reaching Crater Lake she started out on the Pacific Crest Trail. Alone.

Starting on the trail as taken by my aunt.

The plan was that she would hike 15 miles a day and get resupplied at Lake Tahoe. This would actually be the hardest part of the entire journey as it would be the roughest terrain at the highest altitude and she simply wouldn’t be able to carry enough food to make the recommended 4500 calories a day for that section of the trail. No one in the family was happy about this but mom was determined and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

She did have with her an emergency GPS box that had an SOS and an ‘I’m Fine’ button. She would push the button at the end of every day and the family would all get emails with her location. The first three days were fine. At the end of each day (or about two in the afternoon for me) we’d all get an automated email saying she was alive and well with a little link to google maps so we could work out exactly where she was.

On day four there was no message. I called my dad. He said not to worry. She might have just forgotten to push it. On day five there was no message. I called my dad and my sister. Apparently, mom had made them promise that they would not panic and call search and rescue for at least three days because she didn’t want to be embarrassed if she was rescued and nothing was actually wrong. Day six, no message. We called the help line for the company that made her GPS box. From their end it looked like the box had ‘frozen’ and basically needed a reboot. They said that the ‘all good’ signal is pretty weak so as not to drain the batteries but assured us if the SOS button is pressed, even in the frozen state a major signal would get out. That’s all well and good as long as someone is alive, awake, and able to reach the damn box.

By this point we’ve dug out the maps and we’re trying to figure out where mom might be, working on the assumption that she was fine and still hiking along. There would only be one road she would cross and that would be CA 108 at Sonora Pass. A stretch of road the whole family knows well because for multiple generations we would spend our summers camping just to the west of it.

Then, as we are all on the phone, literally trying to figure out which SAR group to contact first, all our phones go off. It’s the automated ‘I’m fine’ email. We check the maps and mom is no where near where she should be. Instead of going 15 miles a day she’s been covering five or less. Something has happened to slow her down considerably, we have zero way of contacting her, and there is no way in hell she’ll get to Lake Tahoe before running out of food. The best option we have is to try to meet her when she crosses the road at Sonora Pass.

A few problems with that. My dad can’t drive (hello diabetic blackouts) and is in and out of a wheelchair. My sister can drive but is not in a job where she can easily get time off and is on crutches due to an aggravated knee injury left over from her ballet days. And I’m in New Zealand. The days go by and we watch mom’s progress as the ‘I’m fine’ button seems to now be working. Some days she goes a full six miles, other days as little as four. There are days when she is up at 11,000 feet traversing nothing but rock with no water sources for miles in either direction.

Finally, 14 days into mom’s trek, on a Sunday my dad and sister get up at four in the morning, taking boxes of supplies, new socks, and a bottle of oxygen, and drive like mad to the pass hoping to catch her as she crosses the road. An hour away from the pass their phone coverage drops out so sitting down in New Zealand I wait.

What I was told was this. They got to the pass by nine and were quickly able to question another walker coming down the trail. They looked at a picture and said that they recognized my mom and said she was just a half hour behind them down the trail. An hour went by and someone else came off the trail. They said the same. They’d passed mom and she wasn’t far behind. Over and over into the afternoon people assured them that they had seen mom and she should be there any minute.

People going the other direction were asked to pass on the message that her husband and daughter were waiting for her. She was utterly surprised by this. Her plan had been to hitchhike down to Sonora and make a call. I don’t know why she was surprised. We knew how much food she was carrying, how far she was going. We can read maps and do basic math.

By the time my sister’s phone started showing her location again all three of them were heading home. What had happened was that on day three mom had slipped slightly crossing a high river. She hadn’t fallen in but in correcting her balance something in her back tweaked. She figured it was just a little strain at it would come right. By the time it was obvious it wasn’t going to come right she had the choice of turning around and going 35 miles back or pushing on 40 miles forward. She could walk, at most, 400 steps before she had to sit and rest do to extreme and building pain. The pain also affected her sleep and ability to eat draining her of that much more energy.

Her chiropractor thinks she rolled a rib which set off cascading muscle spasms. She’s been told to rest and lightly stretch.

But here’s the thing, she’s going back. This Friday if she can find someone to drive her up there. She’s feeling better. She’s trying to repack her bag down to 30 pounds instead of 40 but she’s going back and I don’t think she’s going to quit until she hits her three months or Crater Lake, whichever comes first. It’s not going to get her into any history books but she’ll be well cemented into family legend from here on out.

~

* She also started writing a novel. I’ve read the first three chapters and it’s annoyingly good.

AUDIOBOOK of His Quiet Agent now available!

At long last the audiobook version of His Quiet Agent is available! You can currently get it at Audiobooks.com, Audible, iBooks, eStories, Libro.FM, NOOK, and Scribd.  It should pop up a few more places over the next few weeks including Google Play.  It has also been distributed to several library services so it just might become available at your local library!

M/M Romance Goodread’s Group Memebers’ Choice Awards

In case you missed my squeaking about it on social media there are some wonderful people out there who nominated His Quiet Agent for Member’s Choice Awards. Best Military/Intelligence Officer/Spies (Soldier/Armed Forces/Intelligence Officer/Spy/Assassin/Mercenary) AND Best Book of the Year!

There are stacks of amazing books in both categories but I want to give all my love to everyone who has read and enjoyed my books this year. 2017 has been rough on the ups and downs for a lot of people and the love and kind words from my readers have really seen me through.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/19043853-the-7th-annual-m-m-romance-group-members-choice-awards—polls-now-ope#comment_174271144