After a long, partially pandemic-related hiatus, Too Much Love is back today with Chapter 63.
On the best of days, writing about the Stones is an exercise in organization. TML has over 300 named characters, spans the world, and delves into family history going back to the 18th Century. I've written before about the value of keeping a continuity guide to reference as you write and the one for TML is now approaching novel-length itself. But even with an extensive continuity guide, there are still a ton of supporting documents and, in my case, thousands of emails that make up the origins of a story.
Even when I'm writing every day and have the story in my head pretty much 24/7, I'm constantly referring back to the supporting documents for names, dates, and whether events I had in mind actually made it into the story or were still in potencia. When I step away from the story for a while, it's much worse. I'm terrible with names in the real world and only moderately better when I get to make the names up. To give an example, Nick's assistant Tanvi has been ubiquitous since very early on in the story, but all I could remember about her name was the Purvi / Pervy joke way back in Chapter 18.
As I was getting my writing muscles back into shape this time, I went all the way back to the beginning of my Stone Family supporting material and started reading forward. I wrote my first story about the Stones, "Liaison Services" in 2007, but the family had been percolating for years by that point. Luke Stone first appeared in a zombie apocalypse / urban fantasy play-by-email RPG on eGroups in 1998. He was a Harry Dresden-inspired blood shaman whose world-spanning megafamily had been all but destroyed by the collapse of civilization, but there were aspects to his character and the story that remain even today.
Going over the notes, I came across something I'd completely forgotten. At the top of the character sheet I'd submitted to the RPG was the inscription "PB Stone-Cold Steve Austin."
So that's why the Stone family is the Stone family. They're named after professional wrestler Steve Austin.