Tom Frost: Blog

Google Docs has a suggestion feature that is wrong more often than it's right at the best of times. In chapter 82 of Too Much Love, I introduce a character whose chosen name is "Yes" and everything I write about her is giving the feature fits.

A sharp-eyed reader might wonder why I'm writing chapter 82 when I haven't finished chapter 81 yet to which I would have to reply that, I have in fact finished chapter 81. It's with my editor now and will be published later this week.

Section 1 of TML chapter 81 revolves around Nick seeing Guy and Sarah off as they return to Green Mountainside. I'm on my fourth attempt to write it now - each time from a different perspective and with a different cast of characters.

It's a low-key scene, but it represents the culmination of a slow turn Nick has been taking in his approach to life and it's hard to pull off without seeming like a jarring shift.

Scene two is a similar turning point for Max. At some point, all of Nick's friends have to stop being gobsmacked by their good fortune and start thinking about their ambitions for the future. Arwen took that first step a while ago. Now, it's Max's turn and his approach is going to be very different. Again, it needs to be handled carefully to not seem to be out-of-the-blue.

Having said that, I think I'm going to focus on writing section three first. Section three is a reminder that things aren't always as hard as we worry they might be.

While I've been trying to bang out this chapter, I've been noodling around with a story that shows some members of the Stone family in a less favorable light. I may float a chapter of that story some time soon.

Two of the three sections that will make up Chapter 80 of Too Much Love are done in first draft.

Some readers have DMed and asked me about my posting schedule going forward and it's complicated, so I figured I would post it here.

Each chapter of TML takes me about 20 hours of writing to finish. I'm writing about that much each week now, but I'm currently splitting my writing time between Too Much Love/Jester's Ransom and some shorter stories that I started in order to get the gears turning again and which are targeted for taking 20-30 hours to write for the whole story.

I'm writing these stories with an eye towards publishing them via Amazon. With the first two, I'm going to experiment with posting them on SOL and Amazon at the same time. I'll explain more about why in another blog post.

The first two stories are called A Weekend Spent Saving the World from the universe of Mules, Men, and Honeybees and What Happens in Lactodurum set in New Rome about 20 years before the start of Elevated.

In the meantime, I hope to have a new chapter of Too Much Love or Jester's Ransom every other Thursday going forward. As I get more fully back into the writing groove, I may accelerate the posting schedule, but I'm not quite there yet.

The next time I do a read-through of Too Much Love, I'm going to be making a swath of changes to references of future events in order to move them a bit farther into the future. Most notably, Kiki and Emily going to Japan and Nick bidding on the purchase of a big piece of Brownfield Mills will now be moved past January, 2016 in order to put them outside the planned time frame of this book.

I'm doing this mostly so that there's a chance I'll actually finish TML within the next year or so. Those two events are each big enough to handle a standalone book (or at least a novella) and there are other stories I want to tell once the world of the Stones diverges dramatically from our own (starting in 2016.)

In the meantime, there may be references to those planned events before I get the retcon in. This is a side effect of posting a work in draft - something which I hope to be doing regularly again going forward.

Not coincidentally, chapter 79 is in the can and should appear on SOL tomorrow.

I'm most of the way done with chapter 79 of Too Much Love. The first section of it took about a month to write, the second roughly six days, and the third is half done after about four hours of writing. I'm hoping to get the whole first draft to my editor by tomorrow.

In the meantime, I've been priming my writing brain with a lot of pieces that I may or may not finish and post here on SOL. Some of them are set in the world of the Stones in 2020. That's 4-5 years after the events of TML and Jester's Ransom and, while these particular stories don't involve Nick or Jesse, they do reference events that haven't yet happened in those two stories (both of which are set in 2015 & 2016.)

If I post them with spoilers intact, I'll warn in the author notes.

It feels like I hit that tipping point today where it's easier to write than to not write. Hopefully, this is the resumption of a steady stream of new work.