Tom Frost: Blog

I'm back from a long hiatus and writing more or less daily. If you've been waiting for more TML and missed them, I posted chapters 83 and 84 two weeks ago and now chapter 85 this morning.

To address a few DMs I've gotten and maybe avoid future ones, a quick heads up for those who have made it 2,000+ pages into this story and not figured it out:

* If you don't like stories where men and women both have rich, fulfilling sex lives with multiple partners, you're not going to like my stories.

* If you think the 2000 presidential election was stolen, you're not going to like my stories. Also, if you write to me on the topic, I'll probably just 86 your message as soon as I get to that part.

* And this one might only now be becoming explicit, but I think it should have been obvious: If you think the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax, you're not going to enjoy my stories.

The remainder of this story is very much going to tackle world politics and very much centered around how Jayanesia, which Nick's stepfather Eddie has called "the Mordor of Libertarianism," handles a pandemic lockdown.

For the dozen or so of you who have written to me to complain about my politics (sexual or otherwise,) you do you. I don't kink shame. For the rest of you, I hope you continue to enjoy the story.

Thank you to everyone who wrote to ask if I was alive and well. I am.

I haven't written anything in a while. The need to be creative and specifically to write waxes and wanes with other pressures in my life and some of those other pressures have been intense.

The urge to write is getting stronger again and I've set today aside to focus on it. Here's what I'm dealing with:

* I can't not write. I can for a time put writing aside, but I've been writing fiction in one form or another for forty years.

* If I'm going to write, I really need to try to monetize it in some way so that the need to continue doesn't keep warring inside my head with the need to eat, medicate, and pay my bills.

* Too Much Love really isn't monetizable as-is. It's a shambolic monstrosity of prose - a massive continuity guide masquerading as a novel.

* Every time I think about writing something else, TML rears its head. This is in part because I want to write more in this universe (and about these characters) and part because I viscerally hate the idea of leaving it unfinished.

* There is no way to finish TML in its current form. It took me six years to cover a few months in 2015. What was contemporary AU fiction is rapidly aging into a period piece. To finish it at its current pace and in its current form would take about 2,000 more writing hours.

It's this Gordian knot that faces me pretty much every time I sit down to write. Here's how I'm going to try to cut it.

Starting with Chapter 84, the book is going to take a hard pivot. After a brief Vonnegut-esque explanation for the readers who don't follow this blog (that is to say, nearly all of them,) the story will jump forward more than four years to January 2020. The pacing will change. The perspectives will change. Chapter 85 will be written to stand alone, but also to wrap up a lot of the open threads from the beginning of the book. It will not entirely satisfy the desire for a clean narrative experience. Enormous events in the lives of Nick and his friends will fly by into backstory.

I'm hoping most of the readers will stick around through one more bruising of their expectations of what a story should be.

While I move forward, I will also be trying to work on smaller stand-alone stories for publication. A lot of what I've been planning may contain massive spoilers for the remainder of TML. I hope you'll trust me to keep the stories entertaining enough to read them anyway.

I'm working on Chapter 83 of Too Much Love again - still in the phase of slowly remembering who's in the story and what they've been up to, but hopefully picking up some momentum over the next few days.

There may be some other pieces before it actually appears, but it is moving forward.

There's been a very short story in my hopper for over a decade now. Every year around this time, I would drag it out and try to finish it, but it's not an easy one to write. There's sex in it, but it's more about feelings and how they are expressed through sex when words aren't enough.

"The Rubble or Our Sins" isn't autobiographical, but it has enough of me in it that I didn't want to share it until it felt like it was saying what I wanted to say.

Subtitle: The wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey bits.

A few blog posts back, I mentioned that I was going to have to do another round of retcon to get some predicted dates to line up with the actual dates of action as I streamlined what was going to be in the remainder of the novel.

In favor of moving the writing forward, I've decided to put off that retcon until a later date. In the meantime, sharp-eyed readers may notice some irregularities that I've left in for now.

Most notably, I'm pretty sure that the week between when Nick gets back from New Orleans and when he takes all his non-Stone friends to see Hamilton is 8 days long for Nick and Simon and 9 days long for Max. I don't know how this happened, but there were probably Jesuits involved.