Tom Frost: Blog

I'm down to my last three chapters in the reread and index before I go back to writing new material. Those chapters are complex and include dozens of named characters and even the synopses aren't written yet, but I'm hopeful I can get them done tomorrow. After that, I'll repost the ~30 chapters with retcon changes and a list of those changes.

It's been good and fun rereading, but I can't wait to get back to forward progress.

I'm mostly done with the reread and retcon I've been going through for the last ten days. For the most part, the changes are either localized or cosmetic, but they do require changes in 27 of the first 69 chapters. They're almost all about dates, ages, and names.

The only really wrenching change so far has been in section three of chapter sixty-nine. The normalization of dates and ages in previous chapters made Arwen's confession completely nonsensical. Additionally, I realized that she and Kiki had already discussed Nick's size relative to other men.

So, I did a ground-up rewrite. None of the characters involved have changed in regards to who they are, but a few details have been fine-tuned and an ambiguous point of plot has been disambiguated.

Since I know that only a fraction of the ~5,000 people who have already read that chapter will ever see this notification, I'll try to reiterate some of those points in the story going forward, but the fixes are big enough that I decided to release them now for people who wanted to see what changed.

I just started rereading chapter 61 of Too Much Love and I'm definitely in the deep grass of continuity errors now. I started writing about Nick's Hamilton party in November, 2019, introduced a ton of new characters, then went on hiatus just before the pandemic became big news IRL. When I came back, I tried to restart while only skimming the previous few chapters and knew that if I started by updating the continuity guide, I might not ever get back to the story.

As a result, there are some hysterically bad continuity errors. Lara Laird's husband starts out as Carl, becomes Harry, and eventually settles on George within the span of a couple of chapters. Part of this was because I'd written the introduction of the Ramshackle Stones independently and created another Carl who was very different. Part of this was because I tried to fix the name collision, forgot I'd done that, and fixed it a second time.

Every chapter from 57-60 has some fixes waiting to be published and the chapter where I decide Kaius's name is actually Caius has dozens.

On the plus side, I do have fourteen pages of notes about what's supposed to happen in this story before it ends. I should be able to wrap it up in another 700 pages or so. :smirk:

I just started re-reading chapter 58 of Too Much Love. It's where I left off keeping track of minor character names and started to slack on cross-references.

I'm hoping to get through four chapters a day with cross-referencing and updating the continuity guide. That means I should be able to start writing forward again some time around Monday.

Final edits on Chapter 73 tonight, posting tomorrow.

Rereading Too Much Love, I'm now seeing there are a lot of systematic retcon problems with character ages and when things happened in the backstory. I've decided to make some moderately extensive changes as I write. I will eventually post all of the changes in one place. But, for now, here are the changes I'm planning to backfill:

* Pilar was originally twenty-five at the start of the story, but magically became twenty-eight. I now see why that shifted and it was dumb. She's going back to being twenty-five and about to turn twenty-six.

* Threnody and Jesse are now 25 and 22 respectively, not 28 and 21. That math didn't work.

* Tucker is now about to turn 13 so that he can be 18 in 2020. Anne has gone from 29 to 31.

* The current patriarch's name is Obadiah again. It briefly got changed to William in later chapters.

These changes will take a few days to implement. I'll post the full list when they're posted.