Tom Frost: Blog

After a long, partially pandemic-related hiatus, Too Much Love is back today with Chapter 63.

On the best of days, writing about the Stones is an exercise in organization. TML has over 300 named characters, spans the world, and delves into family history going back to the 18th Century. I've written before about the value of keeping a continuity guide to reference as you write and the one for TML is now approaching novel-length itself. But even with an extensive continuity guide, there are still a ton of supporting documents and, in my case, thousands of emails that make up the origins of a story.

Even when I'm writing every day and have the story in my head pretty much 24/7, I'm constantly referring back to the supporting documents for names, dates, and whether events I had in mind actually made it into the story or were still in potencia. When I step away from the story for a while, it's much worse. I'm terrible with names in the real world and only moderately better when I get to make the names up. To give an example, Nick's assistant Tanvi has been ubiquitous since very early on in the story, but all I could remember about her name was the Purvi / Pervy joke way back in Chapter 18.

As I was getting my writing muscles back into shape this time, I went all the way back to the beginning of my Stone Family supporting material and started reading forward. I wrote my first story about the Stones, "Liaison Services" in 2007, but the family had been percolating for years by that point. Luke Stone first appeared in a zombie apocalypse / urban fantasy play-by-email RPG on eGroups in 1998. He was a Harry Dresden-inspired blood shaman whose world-spanning megafamily had been all but destroyed by the collapse of civilization, but there were aspects to his character and the story that remain even today.

Going over the notes, I came across something I'd completely forgotten. At the top of the character sheet I'd submitted to the RPG was the inscription "PB Stone-Cold Steve Austin."

So that's why the Stone family is the Stone family. They're named after professional wrestler Steve Austin.

Chapter 63 of Too Much Love is with my editor now. Hopefully, he's still around and will spot it soon. If not, I'll (gulp) self-edit.

Either way, I hope to have it posted by the end of the week. It's four pages broken into four sections, one of which I kind of hate and two of which I really really like.

Looking forward to seeing how other people like it.

As this pandemic drags on, but certain small signs of normalcy return to this country and New York City in particular, I find that I'm able to pick up where I left off with Too Much Love - at least in small doses.

Readers following know that I paused the action in the middle of a massive party held in the heart of New York City and full of people who couldn't wait to get into each other's personal space and breathe on each other. Even thinking about Nick's Hamilton party was kind of grossing me out for months.

Depending on how you measure it, I'm either 13 or 22 pages into Chapter 63. I might hate the first section, but I think I'm leaving it as is in the name of moving forward.

Also in the name of moving forward, this may be a shorter chapter than I was churning out. Instead of worrying about ending on a "must continue" note, I'm planning three sections, probably about 32 pages all told.

Thank you to everyone who wrote to encourage me or just reach out during the lockdown. I've been eager to get back to this story pretty much the whole time, but writing a sex-centric story when the idea of people touching each other was creeping you out just wasn't working.

Just a quick note for the readers who have written to me to ask if I'm all right. I am. As is probably obvious from my writing, I live in New York City and am in the very heart of COVID-19 territory. This are pretty grim here, but the wife and I are probably healthy for the time being.

I'm not sure when I'll get back to writing about rich people throwing a big party with lots of people, then going off to see a Broadway play, but it could be any day. Escape is good.

Once again, my paying job has pivoted into technologies that I have less than a full grasp of and filling my putative free time with research into containers, DNS servers, reverse proxies, and orchestration.

On top of that, Chapter 63 of Too Much Love starts with a section from Arwen's perspective where we get more of a sense of why she is the way she is considering how she used to be and it's hard to spell out without seeing contrived.

I'm still writing a bit at a time, not every day, but big chunks of Chapters 63, 64, and 65 of TML are written (as well as parts of 66-69 outlined) and will be out as soon as they're ready as will Chapter 3 of Edge Cases.