Tom Frost: Blog

In the first drafts of the next few chapters of Too Much Love, I've managed to (a) completely lose track of what day it is in the story (b) send Emily on the same car ride twice (c) put a significant supporting character in two places at the same time and (d) have Cricket declare she wants to take a gap year from Yale when she's already taking a gap year from Yale. Other than (d,) none of these require retcon, but taken together they make me feel like I'm writing fan faction set in my own story.

Some advice if you're thinking about writing a million-plus word soap opera of a novel:

(1) If it's at all possible to tell your story using a different structure, do not write a million-plus word soap opera of a novel. It will probably take you years to finish and every level of pre-planning (from seat-of-the-pants to careful outlining) has problems at that scale.

(2) Get a good editor or editors. Mine has saved me from an enormous number of continuity errors (as well as grammar issues, misspellings, bad wording, mushy phrasing, and a couple of dumb ideas.)

(3) Keep some form of TL;DR documentation for yourself that you can check back on to quickly look up names, events, settings, etc. The farther you get into writing a story, the more your time will be eaten up cross-referencing past events.

(4) Even if you have TL;DR (too long; didn't read) documentation, periodicially go back and reread what you've written. The ratio of time it takes to write a novel to the time it takes to read one is 10+:1 and can be a hundred times that.

(5) If you're posting as you write, keep backfilled changes (aka retcon) to a minimum. People keeping current won't know they're there even if you announce those changes and they take up a ridiculous amount of your time.

I'm near the beginning of a reread of TML now in order to do some forward planning, to try to remember all of the threads that need to be woven into the remainder of the book, and to update my continuity guide. It's not coming a moment too soon and there will be at least some retcon-necessary changes.

Too Much Love has been flying out of my brain onto the page lately. I'll be posting Chapter 72 tomorrow. Chapters 73 & 74 are in the editing pipeline and I'm mostly done with 75. Once I finish 75, I'll have all my releases lined up through October 15 including chapter 1 of Jester's Ransom.

With three chapters in the backlog, I'm going to take the opportunity to go back and read what's already in TML, update the continuity guide, and create a big semi-ordered list of what still needs to happen to get TML to the finish line. I might even try outlining it. I'm also going to make a stab at coming up with a list of the stories I've alluded to in TML, but never written - everything from how Emily left Flyspeck to Threnody's kidnapping. I doubt I'll actually write more than a fraction of them, but it's good to have a list to draw from.

I'm hoping to have this done by Sunday, but I'm timeboxing it to next Tuesday before I get back to work on TML 75 & 76 and JR 2.

As human beings, we are the only animals who spend any amount of time trying to convince ourselves not to want what we actually want. It can be argued that there's some value in self-abnegation - not trying to do all the things we want to do is what separates us from the beasts of the wild, particularly when it comes to sex. Civilization is largely an exercise in agreeing not to exercise our right to absolute self-determination in return for a life that is a little bit less nasty, brutish, and short than it would be without laws, traditions, and enforceable contracts.

This doesn't mean we ever really give up wanting what we have always wanted. Where civilizers have gone wrong (in the deeply unhumble opinion of one porn-writing Russian Blue tomcat,) is in the extending the wrongness of certain actions to an implied wrongness of wanting those things. Orthopraxy is essential to civilizaiton. Orthodoxy is the priesthood trying to make you feel bad enough about yourself that you don't notice the flaws of the ruling class and keep filling the collection plate.

Within the context of a pre-industrial tribal agrarian society that relies on patrilineal wealth accumulation as a basis for maintaining its independencs from neighboring tribes, "thou shalt not commit adultery" is a viable rule. "Though shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife or his ass" is just a recipe for unnecessary guilt and shame over what we have been born to do. Some of our neighbors are just very covetable and coveting them is what got us as a species to the point where we had enough surplus to come up with laws and persistent agriculture. Compared to evolution, civilization is still the new hotness.

A big theme of Too Much Love has always been Nick Coyle's journey from being a mensch who denies what he wants to being a mensch who acknowledges he has some pretty atavistic desires and gets to explore them within the context of also wanting to be a decent and civilized person. At the end of chapter 74, it feels like he's finally committed himself fully to that path.

I didn't think it would take anywhere near this long to get that far, but every time I tried to speed his progress along faster, it felt rushed. As of chapter 71, TML is over a million words. I could have gotten here sooner if I'd focused on Nick's perspective, but the journey wouldn't have been as much fun.

On a related note, the outline is not the story.

When I start a new chapter of Too Much Love, I generally write a one or two sentence description of what I want to happen in each section before I start writing. Based on how long I expect each section to be, I usually plan for three or four sections and then add or subtract according to the length of the actual material and whether or not what I've written feels like a chapter yet. Chapters have run to as many as eight sections (cleaning up the odds and ends before Milan in 37 and the Seneschal's Ball in 54) and chapter 22 was a single section focused entirely on the game of strip poker played at the Loft the first time Nick leaves them alone.

Sometimes, I discover that I crammed way too much into the plan for a single chapter once I've started writing. I suspect this happens more often when I get close to parts of the story I've been looking forward to writing for years. That's probably what's been happening lately. Before I started writing the first chapter of Jester's Ransom, I plotted out what still needed to happen in TML before the two stories would line up and determined that it would be in chapter 69, scheduled to be released on September 10.

As of this writing, I've just finished the first draft of chapter 73 and Jesse is still missing. When I started writing this chapter, I expected the resolution of Jesse's kidnapping (which triggers the start of JR) to be in section one of chapter 74. Then I realized that section 73.1 should really be two sections and pushed the planned 73.4 to chapter 75 for thematic reasons. Then section 73.2 ran long - which considering it reintroduces four significant characters should have been obvious. So, it got split into two sections, the second half of which should now be the first section of chapter 74.

Then I wrote the second part of what had originally been 73.1 and was now 73.3 and it was much, much longer than I expected, but also gets some critical details into the story earlier than I'd expected to put them in. I decided to split the section again, the original 73.1 becoming 73.1, 73.3, and probably 74.2. What I expected to take ten pages should now ultimately take around forty. (Lordy, I hope it's only forty.)

That means that, in the current planning, Jesse's kidnapping is now scheduled to be resolved in section 74.4. But thematically, that doesn't really fit with the other three sections. That event sets a lot of other things into motion that should really be grouped together. So, I'll probably push it to section 75.1.

If I do, that means the first chapter of Jester's Ransom is now scheduled for October 8, almost a full month after I originally planned to release it - not because it's not done. It's in the can waiting to be released for proofreading. It's waiting that long because I want people to be able to read both stories as they come out without spoilering major in-story events far in advance.

On the plus side, finishing chapter 73 where I just did has advantages. My backlog is now a few days longer. I can start on chapter 74 of TML and chapter 2 of JR that much sooner. The storyline Simon is following will be better spaced and less rushed. And chapter 73 is now thematically much more solid, but still has room for the least pandemic-appropriate scene I could have written.

Chapter 71 should be out tomorrow and it's a big one. Prudence makes a decision. Max discovers a fresh appreciation for being seneschal. And Ainsley comes to a new understanding with Pilar.

Back in November 2014, when I first started fleshing out The Billionaire DM (the story that eventually became Too Much Love,) I had a vastly different idea of what the story would be.

Nick was not a Stone.

Connie Carlyle was both the model/actress she is currently and his tragically dead mother. Anna Coyle was Arwen's mother and Ed's second wife.

Yes, Arwen was Nick's stepsister and he still had a crush on her. And I still planned on having them bang it out eventually.

Max was a pot smoking Chinese kid who went by Al. He was notoriously bad at math and also fat.

The sexy, devious, self-dealing lawyer was Rosangela who already looked remarkably like a young Aria Giovanni.

Nick was a much bigger nerd. Playing D&D with lingerie models was still going to be his opening gambit, but he was supposed to escalate from there until (I quote from my notes,) "zero g sex with Emily in orbit."

Emily, Kiki, and Casey were a single character, a high-functioning nymphomaniac raised in an apocalypse cult in Texas, making a living cosplaying and grifting horny nerd boys. Stuff I wrote for her wound up going not only to those three characters, but also to Rini and Risi.

Oh, yeah. Arwen hated her name and wasn't a nerd. She was more like Cyrene and Nick would have bribed her to play that D&D game with him, Emily, Al, and a player to be named later. The relationships were all a lot more dysfunctional.

It was almost a year later before I wrote the first sentence of what would eventually be Too Much Love. Figuring out that Nick should be a Stone made a huge difference. Making Arwen not his stepsister was largely a marketing decision, but it also allowed Nick to start out as much more of an innocent. Once I decided that one of the themes should be to show how a normal guy can become a total sexual deviant and still be a normal guy, he probably shouldn't start out lusting after his stepsister. Also, that sort of thing gets stories tossed in the porn dungeon on Amazon.

My favorite part is that I started out with a rough outline:

Chapters 1-10: Nick wallows in pussy.
Chapters 11-20: Nick buys a plane, wallows in money and also pussy.
Chapters 21-30: Nick wallows in being a Stone.
Chapters 31-40: Nick gets involved in Stone family politics and starts to take his responsibilities seriously.
Chapters 41-45: Nick blows up the world and goes into hiding where he again wallows in pussy and spends his days playing D&D.

If you've been reading along, that last bit isn't a spoiler. It's not on the table anymore. Nick isn't the recluse I first envisioned. He's also less of a Gary Stu. That's part of why I gave him more friends - so the extraordinariness could be spread around.

The part that made me laugh and triggered this blog entry was that I imagined Nick seriously entering into family politics in chapter 31. I even wrote the scene where he accepts the mantle of that responsibility. I just rewrote it to fit the new story. It's in chapter 72.

Like the story, this blog post is already much longer than I meant it to be. I wanted to write about who I used as physical models for some of the women in this story, how those models came to inhabit the characters, and how I imperfectly filed the serial numbers off of Shelby, leaving her with a name way too close to the model she's based on. But that's a story for another time.