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.
