Tom Frost: Blog

I don't love how it turned out, but it does what it's supposed to do. Hopefully, I'll be sharing it with you all.

I'm already working on chapter 88 which introduces the third of the three new storylines that should carry us through to the end of TML and which brings us one step closer to re-introducing a bunch of old friends.

...but thanks for the shout-out whoever I ran into on r/recruitinghell. Yes, that was me.

I've been slogging through the next chapter of Too Much Love largely because I don't like Royce Inoue-Stone as much as I have some of my other viewpoint characters and I'm having a hard time getting inside his head. His relative unlikeability is intentional, but it is making it harder to find the flow of his story.

In the meantime, I'm trying the technique of just sitting down and writing whenever I have time to write and not worrying about what I'm writing too much. I've worked on a dozen different stories since I posted the last chapter of TML and four of them are different isekai stories inspired by stories I've read or games I've played.

Isekai, for those who don't know random words borrowed from Japanese, is a genre where the protagonist is transported from one world to another - quite often from some version of the modern world to some fantasy world. I often hear them referred to as "light novels."

A lot of isekai novels have the protagonist not just leaving their homeworld for another, but also finding themselves in an unfamiliar body and granted strange powers.

They're the ultimate fish-out-of-water stories and they provide enormous freedom for authors who want to write dirty stories. Writing about Nick is a great exercise in exploring what someone with functionally unlimited money can get up to in his sex life, but ultimately he and his lovers will all be normal, contemporary human beings. In an Isekai story, your MC can have the body of an ogre, a vampire or even a "dungeon core," but still have a modern man's appreciation of the world he is suddenly living in.

So, this is mostly to say that I'm still writing and I hope to have the next chapter of TML ready soon, but also to see what y'all think about isekai in general and to have some early input into what a story I write in the genre might look like.

It's mentioned in the "transition chapter" of Too Much Love that, in the Stone universe, Donald Trump never gets involved in national politics and never even made much of a splash as a real estate developer in NYC. (Tom-the-author says he's "nobody you would have ever heard of.")

In one way, that's a shame because I now really want Eddie Coyle to refer to Nick's new home as "Marx a Lago."

It occured to me as I was editing chapter 86 of Too Much Love for today's publication that it might look a little choppy to see another perspective from another brand new character who seems to have no obvious connection to Nick & Co. As with all of my strange writerly habits, I beg the readers' indulgence and promise there's a plan behind it.

In this case, my strategy for restarting TML is to tell the rest of the book through three rotating stories that are initially told by people who haven't been around since the beginning. That way, when these new characters encounter Nick, Max, Simon, Arwen, Lev, Dennis, and some of the other characters from the first part, it makes sense to treat those characters as "new" and fill in what they've been up to recently.

I hope this will work well. Time will tell.