Tom Frost: Blog

First, the big news. I've got the first draft of a full story with my editor. "The Woman on the Ledge" is a Robin Hood meets Sid and Nancy story set in a country based loosely on the breakaway region of Moldova known as Transnistria because, you know, I apparently hate writing anything that might have the slightest chance of commercial success.

The second story is called Delicate Flower of Violence and its central premise - of an older man who engages in violent crimes for a living taking a young, damaged female protege - has been kicking around in my head for at least twenty years. It's Killing Eve meets The Princess Bride because, again, I'm really bad at writing anything a publisher could possibly find a niche for. This is the opening line:

The first two times I see Mei, she’s in the middle of two different fights, three years apart. The third time I see her, she’s working retail.

Basically, everything but the core premise has been replaced. Courtesy of my daily writing exercise with the help of JanitorAI, the female lead now has way more agency and is much more angry than sad.

In the meantime, I write a little bit more of Big Demon on Campus every day. I'm hoping to have it done in a week or so.

Embracing my ADHD (now officially diagnosed!) as part of my workflow has really, genuinely helped me start writing again and finishing a full story (even if it's < 5,000 words) is a big milestone.

Ari: I thought that alpha-wolf stuff turned out to be bullshit?

Floria: Maybe it is. I wouldn’t want to be the one to try to explain that to a pack of werewolves.

For the last couple of days, I've been working on Big Demon on Campus, a short story about a young half-incubus who is trying to straddle the worlds of his human and supernatural sides while figuring out what it means to be a twenty-first century sex demon.

I already have a beat list for the story and it comes in at a very manageable fifteen beats in spite of the moderately large cast and surprisingly-complex themes I want to touch on. I'm hoping to keep the entire story under 75 pages.

The first thing I've written is a dialog between the main character and his potential love interest in which she infodumps roughly 4,000 words of worldbuilding on him. When you do that much exposition all at once, you have to break it up with action or it bogs down. This run was just to get the world out of my own head and into a form that I don't have to worry about forgetting it. The monospaced text above shows the last two lines.

Unlike my previous work on SOL, I'm planning to finish writing BDOC before I start posting it. I'm also planning to initially post it to the members-only section and and publish it on SOL's eBook platform in order to give readers who've shown an interest in helping finance my work a chance to do so.

If everything goes smoothly, I'll publish BDOC to Amazon 30 days in and release it to SOL's free-for-everyone readers 30 days after that.

I'm working on a much longer article on the topic of all the shortcomings of using large language models to help you write porn, but I just wrote a prompt on JanitorAI that totally sent the script into a tailspin.

I'm using the LLM to help me structure and build a story about sexual politics in NYC before and during the 2020 lockdown.

The main love triangle in the story is between the first-person character (Jester,) his aspiring-yoga-teacher girlfriend, Zephyr, and Zephyr's hot bisexual Korean-American roommate who calls herself Jenna.

This is the prompt I've written:

(It's three nights later. Zephyr and I are naked in bed together after another night of intense love-making.)

*Still, I don't let it go. A few nights later when Zephyr and I are lying in each other's arms, our bodies cooling from another bout of intense sex. As casually as I can, I ask* So, have you and Jenna ever hooked up?

*Zephyr smirks down at me and asks, "Why? Do you want to hook up with my hot Korean roommate?"*

*Something in her tone gives me pause.* Somehow, that feels like a trick question with no right answer.


The added subtext is that Zephyr and Jenna grew up together on an artist's collective where non-traditional relationships were somewhat common. Zephyr is afraid that Jester is only dating her because he expects her to be into three-ways and such.

The LLM doesn't get that subtext, but it also doesn't punt. Instead, as I've tried to modify that prompt to get the story back on track, I've had the bot assume (on subsequent runs) that (a) I am the one asking the question about the hot Korean roommate (b) I am speaking to another person off-camera and Zephyr herself is now my hot Korean roommate (c) I am a hot Korean girl instead of the white guy I've been all story.

The short moral of this posting is that, the more I learn about LLMs, the less I worry about them taking over the world. With a lot of coaching, they can be helpful for structuring and pacing, but their biggest use for me has been in prompting me to really think about what story I'm trying to tell when they start telling an entirely different one.

(On the plus side, I do now have four short stories is various states of composition that I used LLMs to pre-draft. That's four more short stories than I've been able to write in years.)

I've been working with Janitor AI for the last couple of weeks as part of a project to try to use large language models to run structured RPGs. There are a lot of technical limitations to that process which I may go into in some detail later. Still, now that I have a rough idea of how to define chatbot characters, I can say that Janitor AI is a really good tool for helping you build a really rough first draft, particularly if you're terrible at keeping your short stories short like I am.

There could be a story called "Swept Away with Victoria-Rose" coming from this shortly. Or, if you're interested in playing the scenario I used to create the story, you can check out the character "Emily Rose" that I created on Janitor AI.

I've been absent from writing for a while. Real life and all that. This week was the first time in a while that I put (virtual) pen to (figurative) paper in a while. I've been rereading Elevated and pulling out an outline for a rewrite to be e-book ready.

I wrote an entire chapter of Too Much Love that I was really unhappy with. I tried to dissect it and kept running up against problems with the Stone Family Universe and how it got to where it is. The core trouble is that, as TML moves to a worldwide scale, the lack of any setup for the history of the world outside of the Stone family is making it impossible to tell the story I want to tell without a massive Great Gatsby style exposition dump of how that world is different from our own.

In short, the Stone "family" first appears in late seventeenth or early eighteenth century America, becomes extremely wealthy and powerful, gets involved in all sorts of major world events, and even precipitates the creation of both a new papal state in Europe and a libertarian "utopia" in the Pacific, but for all I've written about it, the world continues to choose the same leaders and make the same choices right up until 2016 when they elect a huckster named Joshua Hader to be President of the United States. Trying to write about that has been slogging through a big pile of "This Just Doesn't Work."

From the beginning, the plan with Too Much Love was to write it as a long first draft, then go back, chop it into manageable, publishable pieces, rewrite those around what I learned by writing it, and publish those. That draft turned out much, much longer than I originally planned and could easily take three more years to write if I focused on it full time. So, I'm putting SOL on hold indefinitely. I may eventually put a "capper" or two chapter on it set in 2025, but continuing to try to finish it just because I absolutely love it is keeping me from writing anything else.

Through the end of 2024, I'm going to be focused on writing for self-publication. I've been writing erotica under various pseudonyms for 20+ years now and I've always pulled back just before doing that even though it was always my intention. Right now, my focus is on getting "The Elevation of Corvus Gallicus" (a full rewrite of Elevated) ready for publication, although I'm also poking a number of short stories pulled out of SOL to see if I can get those finished in a timely fashion. I used to be able to write short stories (and to finish novels) and I need to get back to that.

TL;DR for anyone who doesn't want to slog through the above: I'm not dead. I'm starting to write again. Too Much Love will never be finished, but I'm planning to dissect it and extract the best stories into a form where I can share them with an audience that only reads finished drafts.