Tom Frost: Blog

At some point, I made the mistake of answering DMs on SOL and not archiving the message. As a result, I had messages marked as read going back to March of last year, some of which I'd replied to and some of which I hadn't. Rather than be doubly-weird by answering mail going back months that in some cases, I'd already answered, I purged everything from 2019.

Please know that, even if I didn't reply, your feedback is a big reason I keep writing and publishing here on SOL.

Chapter 3 of Edge Cases is scheduled to be released on Feb 21 (although it's not written yet.) Chapter 62 of Too Much Love should be out Feb 28 (just needs edits.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I need to work on something besides Too Much Love if this writing thing is going to work out.

I just submitted the first two chapters of Edge Cases, a far-future science fiction story about a QA engineer who gets a chance to go work on a Westworld-style planet and, in the process, becomes entangled in a secret war for the future of humanity. (Yes, that old story again.)

My goal going forward is to post a new chapter of TML every third week and a chapter of Edge Cases two weeks later. Chapter 61 of TML is already in the can and Chapter 62 3/4 done.

If you get a chance to read the beginning of Edge Cases, let me know what you think. I have a full story arc planned, but there's lots of room to integrate reader feedback on the way.

Chapter 61 of Too Much Love is in the can and, with the exception of some light editing, ready for its planned publication date of January 17.

Chapter 62 is done in draft and off to my editor. If everything goes according to plan, it will be published February 7. Most of it is the first half of a story to be released independently currently called Saint Paul and the Ramshackle Stones. This is an experiment in writing both TML (which is unpublishable almost by design) and works that can get self-published to the Zon.

My plan for this year (and I'm pretty sure I've never stuck with a writing plan for a whole year, but hope springs eternal) is to publish a chapter of TML every three weeks for a total of 17 chapters. These would embed two or three standalone novellas that can be read without slogging through all of TML.

This should give me enough time to work on a novel-length novel and do some edits on Elevated to make it publication ready. For the proper novel, I'm currently working on a first draft of Edge Cases, a science fiction novel about software testing. (Yes, really.)

I picked a terrible time to pause my writing of Too Much Love.

In all fairness, there haven't been many good times to pause. TML is essentially a story about prolonged hyperaccelerated personal growth. Most of the characters in it are in their late teens or early twenties - a time where they are primed to convert whatever resources they can get their hands on into their own adult selves. Applying functionally limitless resources to that formula means that who Nick, Max, Arwen, Lev, and the twins are changes from day to day.

That being said, Chapter 59 is the beginning of the Hamilton weekend and has a huge number of moving parts all suddenly moving much faster. Nick is leaving his first real imprint on the Stone family. Verity is having her "coming out." Shelby is spending her last weekend in New York before heading off to college. Pilar is more fully subsuming herself into the sex goddess she wants to be.

In this moment, writing a scene requires me to hold in my head who each character is, who they're becoming, who they think they're becoming, and what they've done so far. It's very easy for the writing to get flat and expository and for character actions to seem unjustifiably inconsistent with what's come before.

The bulk of chapter 59 revolves around one of Nick's biggest transitions to date. Each time I sat down to write it, it didn't feel like something Nick would do. I hadn't sold it to myself. I put aside five drafts of those scenes, trying to get them right.

But, to paraphrase Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, even though the fifth castle burned, fell down, then sank into the swamp, the sixth castle held strong. I sent a draft of chapter 59 to my editor this morning and started in on chapter 60 somewhat later this morning.

That being said, the events of Too Much Love are currently happening in September, 2015 - more than four years before today's date. And there are plenty of stories I'd like to tell (both about the Stone family and others) that happen after that. I need to write other things. For a while, I thought that meant wrapping up TML at the end of the Hamilton weekend and telling the story of Nick and his friends in smaller vignette-sized stories, but that felt too unsatisfying. Then, I considered Halloween, but it has the same issue of having more open threads than completed ones.

What I'm going to try going forward is a bit unprecedented, I think. Rather than try to turn Too Much Love into something it's not, my plan is to interweave future chapters with other stories - some Stone-related, some not. Some of them will happen years after the events of the chapter they're coming out in parallel to and may even reference events planned for dozens of chapters in the future of TML.

To serve that end, I'm working out a rough outline of where Nick's story goes from September 2015 on. I expect Too Much Love to wrap up around December 2016, but that won't be the end of Nick's story and certainly not the end of the Stones.

I don't know if TML will ever be a coherent story or just serve as a massive "backstory document" for other, more compact stories. All I know is that there's no reason to stop creating it as long as I'm enjoying writing and you're enjoying reading.

I've been stalled on Too Much Love for months now, but it's getting to the point where I have to create something soon or my head is going to fucking explode.

If that creation turns out to be something narrative and prurient, I'll post it here. (It usually does.)