Tom Frost: Blog

I'm restarting chapter 59 of Too Much Love for the fourth time today. The original idea for the chapter was to show how proximity to Nick and his wealth was changing people's lives without Nick or any of his inner circle actually appearing in the chapter, but after three attempts, it kept falling apart without a center to hang it on.

Instead, I'm pretty sure now it will be three sections - two from the perspective of characters who are about to leave center stage for a while and all of whom are seeing their loyalties shift as a result of Nick and his actions.

I hope to get it out some time in August.

The last few weeks, I've gotten my schedule into enough order that I'm again writing roughly fifteen hours a week. I'm hoping to get up to my peak writing rate of 20-25 hours a week. This is generally enough to have a new chapter of Too Much Love available every Friday morning if that's the only thing I work on. But, there's a catch.

I made a promise to my wife at the beginning of 2018 that I would find a way to make money with my writing that year or spend less time on it in favor of some more profitable hobby. With the end of tax season, the subject has come up again and I promised that I would have something available on Amazon by the end of July and to release five short pieces by the end of the year.

The plan is to get back up to peak writing output and to intersperse new chapters of Too Much Love with shorter pieces every other week. I plan to publish all of these new, shorter pieces to SOL at the same time that they go out to the Zon. My goal is to find new writers by expanding to a new market, not to monetize my existing readership.

There are a few stumbling-blocks that have kept me from publishing until now. First, I don't write to genre very well. There are no Navy SEALs or alpha male FBI agents in my stories. Similarly, anyone who's been following Too Much Love knows that my billionionaires aren't cut from the same mold as Christian Grey (even when I play with the idea that they might be.)

The other problem of course is that I have a certain verbosity that tends to turn cute little stories about newly-minted billionaires playing Dungeons & Dragons with lingerie models and turn them into 2,000+ page epics about globe-spanning uberfamilies and their effect on humanity's sexual ethos. I need to write some pieces in the 30-50 page range.

The first piece I'm working on is based around Jesse Stone and is meant to be readable as a stand-alone story, but after that, there are any number of directions I can go. I have more Stone stories, a possible story set in New Rome. and settings I haven't even touched yet - two involving superpowers set in the 1980s and 1990s, one possibly in the LitRPG genre.

I've got until the end of August to finish the second short story, so I thought I'd throw open to the floor what readers here would like to see written next? One of the above? Something related to one of the story's I've already written? Within the confines of the above (30-50 pages, able to be read stand-alone,) I'm open to suggestions.

As I was finishing chapter 57 of Too Much Love, I also outlined what I thought would be in chapters 58-67. It turns out I was wrong right out of the gate. The first half of my planned Chapter 58 ran to fifty pages and, fortunately, ended on a good stopping point. So, it's off to my editor (who might be on vacation right now) and should be published either this Friday or next.

It wound up much longer than I expected it to be (47 pages in first draft,) but I hope to have it up by Friday.

I had hoped to get the next chapter of Too Much Love on the site this weekend. A number of RL events have slowed my writing speed.

I'm about 60% of the way through the first draft. After that, it will need a continuity edit and a proofread. April 5 is now looking like a much more realistic target.