Tom Frost: Blog

Chapter 66 (which coincidentally is posting as we speak) of Too Much Love would be titled "Quality Alone Time" as every scene seems to revolve around that topic.

Chapter 67 is already with my editor. It's about 60% of the content I originally expected to put into it, but if I'd kept to the original plan, it would have run about 64 pages and still not have a first pass done.

Chapter 68 is a big lift. I've already written the really important section ~2.5 times because getting it wrong or making it sloppy would really hurt the quality of the story going forward. I'm hoping to send it forward this weekend.

In the original version of Jester's Ransom set in 2010, it's a significant plot point that Jesse Stone attends Tulane in New Orleans.

Today, I did a quick search to see if I'd mentioned Tulane anywhere in Too Much Love. The only reference I found was that Jesse wore a Tulane sweatshirt in Chapter 22. Because Too Much Love is a work-in-draft, I've made it a general policy not to fix retcon errors this time around unless they are small and localized.

In this case, I made an exception. Jesse is now wearing the sweats of a college referred to as SUNOLA, which will be expanded out in Chapter 67 of Too Much Love to Stryker University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

When an author creates a fictional but recognizable analogue of a real place, company, or person, it's often because they plan to set events there that, should they instead use the original setting, would probably get them sued.

The story of Jesse's kidnapping, his unexpected relationship with one of the kidnappers, and the potentially litigation-worthy-if-I-used-a-real-college behavior that follows are scheduled to start appearing here at SOL on September 10.

And I'd definitely better make sure that, whatever I call Jesse's fraternity, it's not one that actually exists.

Before Nick Coyle turned eighteen, inherited a fortune, and discovered he was a member of the Stone family, there was Jesse. Sort of.

Too Much Love was actually meant to be a prequel to another novel called Jester's Ransom that I'd hashed out with a coauthor in a play-by-email style years earlier. The first draft of Jester's Ransom starts with Jesse being kidnapped and subsequently extracted by Gibraltar Security. It contains the first appearances of Jesse, Penny, Faruq, Threnody, Verity, and a host of other characters that subsequently turned up in Too Much Love. The first write-through was created largely streams-of-consciousness. My coauthor and I took turns writing sections of the novel as a way to find out what happened next. It was even more of a glorious mess than Too Much Love is currently.

We finished it and planned to put it aside for a month or two, then rewrite it in novel form and share it with readers in some way. As anyone who's been waiting for the revised and edited version of Elevated to hit Amazon can tell you, I have a pretty terrible track record when it comes to publishing anything anywhere other than here on SOL. A lot of that has to do with real life and my day job sucking up all of my time until writing falls by the wayside, but part of it is that writing for publication and writing to tell a good story are two overlapping, but not identical skills. I really enjoy one and kind of stumble through the other as best I can.

But for whatever reason, Jester's Ransom languished for years. I wrote other things (including Elevated,) but in the meantime, I kept coming up with stories for the Stone Family.

Too Much Love is the first of those stories I've actually shared and the first to hold Stone Family canon up for public perusal. As such, it also defines what is canon. Pretty much every character and event in Jester's Ransom will need to change to fit into the same universe with Too Much Love. Re-reading the original draft of Jester's Ransom is a bit like discovering I wrote fan fiction about the Stones for myself before I wrote anything meant to be seen by anyone else.

Discovering where Too Much Love ends made a lot of things click in my head. One of them was that Jester's Ransom should start before the first novel is over. Rather that starting in June 2017, Jesse should be kidnapped in September 2015, a few months before the Very Big Event.

One implication of this is that Nick will hear about and be effected by Jesse's kidnapping during Too Much Love. In fact, it makes perfect sense for things to kick off in Chapter 67 while he's (redacted for spoilers.)

A side effect of this is that Nick will learn about Jesse's kidnapping, get freaked out by it, find out Jesse's been extracted, and decide that he has enough to worry about without sticking his nose in Jesse's business all pretty much without finding out what actually happened. As a reader, it would be very easy to think, "Wait, Nick's billionaire cousin got kidnapped and rescued and we don't get to read about what happened?"

This post is to let you know that's not the plan. Instead, I've started working with my coauthor to have the first chapters of Jester's Ransom ready to post by September 10, when I also expect to publish chapter 70 of Too Much Love in which Jesse re-emerges from his ordeal. I'm moderately comfortable doing this because I've already got a backlog of Too Much Love in the editing pipeline and a good head of writing steam.

This does mean that the hiatus for Edge Cases will be extended for some unspecifiable amount of time, but that was already true. I'll keep working on Edge Cases when ideas for it percolate up, but posting more chapters is almost certainly a ways away.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to sharing Jester's Ransom with you via SOL. We're writing it to stand alone from Too Much Love. You don't need to read one to follow the other. Unlike Too Much Love, Jester's Ransom is expected to follow the conventions of a novel with a definite beginning, middle, and end. It should also be roughly novel length.

It will probably also be a lot darker than Too Much Love. While Nick's story definitely touches on some heavy subjects, Nick is basically determined to be a mensch. Jesse is a much more troubled young man, born to wealth, somewhat oblivious to the concerns of ordinary people, and deeply entwined in Threnody's damage from her own kidnapping. Oh, and the core story of Jester's Ransom is Jesse's relationship with a young woman who helped kidnap him. So, while there's still a lot of sexy fun, it's going to go some very different places than Too Much Love.

When I first started writing Too Much Love in 2016, the long-term plan was for it to cover the two years between Nick Coyle's eighteenth and twentieth birthdays in 2015 and 2017 respectively. I knew from very early on how it would end and where Nick would be when he turned twenty.

As I wrote, I got a sense that it was going to take me a Very Long Time to write that book. Chapter 1 starts on June 25, 2015. Chapter 30 ends on July 16. At a rate of roughly 3/4 day per chapter, it would take 975 chapters to cover those two years. I didn't expect it to actually run that long, having successfully used a bit of hockey-stick pacing in Elevated with good results, but I knew it was going to take a long time.

As I kept writing, committing the Stone Family that had largely lived in my head to the page, and exploring Nick's day-to-day life, it started to dawn on me that the chapters were getting bigger and bigger and covering less time. The cast of Too Much Love is enormous and most of the characters have their own stories to tell.

If I were writing Too Much Love to publish on a deadline, I would have strapped it to the editing table, excised any of the scenes that didn't move the story towards at least one of the five major milestones I had planned for Nick's life, and tried to get the whole thing done in under 1,000 pages by the end of 2017 (real time, not story-time.)

Instead, I kept writing the story I wanted to tell and built the world I wanted to build. I added a warning to the story's frontmatter indicating that there was a good chance that I would never finish it, but every new chapter continued to get about 6-7,000 reads, so I accepted that people were continuing to enjoy what I put out.

The problems with this approach were manifold. One of the major plot points of Too Much Love was supposed to involve the terrible world-changing outcome of the US presidential election of 2016 throwing things into chaos for Nick and the people he cared about. The problem was that it wasn't the terrible world-changing outcome that actually happened.

The world of the Stones is not our world. It's very much like our world with a lot of the same problems, a lot of the same celebrities, and many common points of culture. But, while recognizable people from the real world do appear in Too Much Love, I'm not comfortable with having them do things they haven't actually done. Connie thinks Kate Moss stole her date at a party in the nineties, but we never find out if she actually did. Max and Paige toy with the idea of trying to have a threesome with Mila Kunis, but she doesn't agree to it. The most I'm comfortable with is that Kristian Nairn who played Hodor in Game of Thrones DJs the Seneschal's Ball and takes some pictures with Paige.

So, I made an executive decision early on, which I now call the Veep rule: Because the story will eventually be heavily influenced by the 2016 election and its fallout, none of the major players will be the actual human beings who ran for office, managed their campaigns, or had any real, significant role in politics that year. The Democratic nominee is not Hillary Clinton. Her progressive challenger is not Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee and does not become the 46th president of the United States.

I call this the Veep rule because on the long-running TV show Veep, none of the real presidents after Bush 43 ever appear. They just didn't happen. When asked about this in an interview, series star Julia Louis-Dreyfuss said that, in the world of Veep, Donald Trump exists, but he's probably selling shoes at an outlet mall in Seacaucus (or words to that effect.)

So, in the world of the Stones, Donald Trump isn't involved in politics by 2016. Instead, he made the mistake of trying to fuck over Inez's father in on a business deal in the early 1990s and the Stones buried him in a hole so deep it went all the way through to China (instead of the hole he dug himself in the real world which came out in Russia.)

The reason I'm mentioning this now is because the events of chapter 64 of Too Much Love suggested a good stopping point for book one. There's actually an end in sight. It's still many chapters out, but the realization that this story will end in early 2016 has given shape to the story as a whole. For one thing, the 2016 election doesn't happen in this book. For Nick and his crew who are so wrapped up in their own thing, it's only a distant blip on the horizon. That also means I can break out the election, its consequences, and a particular Simon-driven storyline into their own book. And I can juggle planned events around for Jester's Ransom, the Jesse-centered book, to coincide with the end of Too Much Love and the beginning of its as-yet-unnamed sequel.

Now that I know where Too Much Love ends, I'll be changing the synopsis and the end notes. I really should change the title as well since the part of Nick's story that "too much love" refers to doesn't really happen until Book 2, but I've only changed it once and, as I learned from The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, people only have so much tolerance for such shenannigans.

But the main reason I mention this is that I'm just starting to write Chapter 67 and it lays some of the groundwork for the central conflict of book 2. The scene is fictional, but it has many of the details of a real, politically-charged event from the last few years, right down to the cheap plastic tiki torches.

I'm pretty sure anyone who reads me in spite of my politics has abandoned Too Much Love by now, but if you are, you haven't, and you're the kind of person who believes there are good people on both sides of every argument, you might want to stop now.

Contains minor spoilers for Too Much Love Chapters 63 and 64 and bigger ones for the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series was an epic, world-spanning saga with hundreds of significant characters, a vast backstory, and a million details to line up. It eventually ran to fifteen books and each book average about 800 pages in paperback.

Compared to Wheel of Time as a whole, Too Much Love is a light summer read, but as soon as I finished writing chapter 63, I worried about a possible parallel.

Casual research doesn't bring up the details, but a running theme of WoT fandom was the notion of Mat being stuck under the wall. Near the end of one book, Matrim Cauthon is trapped under a collapsed wall. Matrim is a major character, one of the core companions of the main character, Rand Al'Thor, and a fan favorite. Engaged readers wanted to know what happened to Mat next.

A few years later, the next book came out and Mat wasn't in it. He would be in the next book, but there was something like five years between him getting trapped under that wall and getting out. The phrase "and Mat's still stuck under the wall" entered the lexicon.

It took me four months to write and post chapter 63 after finishing chapter 64. Life, a job change, murder hornets, the pandemic, and the lockdown happened. A few people made some half-hearted attempts to set my neighborhood on fire.

Still, considering how I ended chapter 63, I felt like it would be excessively cruel to make my readers wait months or even weeks to see what happened next. This apparently spurred me to new heights of creativity because chapter 64 is already with my editor.

Mat stayed under the wall for years, but Nick will get out of the elevator in short order.

Although, to keep some parallel, Churchmouse does not actually appear in this chapter.