Before Nick Coyle turned eighteen, inherited a fortune, and discovered he was a member of the Stone family, there was Jesse. Sort of.
Too Much Love was actually meant to be a prequel to another novel called Jester's Ransom that I'd hashed out with a coauthor in a play-by-email style years earlier. The first draft of Jester's Ransom starts with Jesse being kidnapped and subsequently extracted by Gibraltar Security. It contains the first appearances of Jesse, Penny, Faruq, Threnody, Verity, and a host of other characters that subsequently turned up in Too Much Love. The first write-through was created largely streams-of-consciousness. My coauthor and I took turns writing sections of the novel as a way to find out what happened next. It was even more of a glorious mess than Too Much Love is currently.
We finished it and planned to put it aside for a month or two, then rewrite it in novel form and share it with readers in some way. As anyone who's been waiting for the revised and edited version of Elevated to hit Amazon can tell you, I have a pretty terrible track record when it comes to publishing anything anywhere other than here on SOL. A lot of that has to do with real life and my day job sucking up all of my time until writing falls by the wayside, but part of it is that writing for publication and writing to tell a good story are two overlapping, but not identical skills. I really enjoy one and kind of stumble through the other as best I can.
But for whatever reason, Jester's Ransom languished for years. I wrote other things (including Elevated,) but in the meantime, I kept coming up with stories for the Stone Family.
Too Much Love is the first of those stories I've actually shared and the first to hold Stone Family canon up for public perusal. As such, it also defines what is canon. Pretty much every character and event in Jester's Ransom will need to change to fit into the same universe with Too Much Love. Re-reading the original draft of Jester's Ransom is a bit like discovering I wrote fan fiction about the Stones for myself before I wrote anything meant to be seen by anyone else.
Discovering where Too Much Love ends made a lot of things click in my head. One of them was that Jester's Ransom should start before the first novel is over. Rather that starting in June 2017, Jesse should be kidnapped in September 2015, a few months before the Very Big Event.
One implication of this is that Nick will hear about and be effected by Jesse's kidnapping during Too Much Love. In fact, it makes perfect sense for things to kick off in Chapter 67 while he's (redacted for spoilers.)
A side effect of this is that Nick will learn about Jesse's kidnapping, get freaked out by it, find out Jesse's been extracted, and decide that he has enough to worry about without sticking his nose in Jesse's business all pretty much without finding out what actually happened. As a reader, it would be very easy to think, "Wait, Nick's billionaire cousin got kidnapped and rescued and we don't get to read about what happened?"
This post is to let you know that's not the plan. Instead, I've started working with my coauthor to have the first chapters of Jester's Ransom ready to post by September 10, when I also expect to publish chapter 70 of Too Much Love in which Jesse re-emerges from his ordeal. I'm moderately comfortable doing this because I've already got a backlog of Too Much Love in the editing pipeline and a good head of writing steam.
This does mean that the hiatus for Edge Cases will be extended for some unspecifiable amount of time, but that was already true. I'll keep working on Edge Cases when ideas for it percolate up, but posting more chapters is almost certainly a ways away.
In the meantime, I'm looking forward to sharing Jester's Ransom with you via SOL. We're writing it to stand alone from Too Much Love. You don't need to read one to follow the other. Unlike Too Much Love, Jester's Ransom is expected to follow the conventions of a novel with a definite beginning, middle, and end. It should also be roughly novel length.
It will probably also be a lot darker than Too Much Love. While Nick's story definitely touches on some heavy subjects, Nick is basically determined to be a mensch. Jesse is a much more troubled young man, born to wealth, somewhat oblivious to the concerns of ordinary people, and deeply entwined in Threnody's damage from her own kidnapping. Oh, and the core story of Jester's Ransom is Jesse's relationship with a young woman who helped kidnap him. So, while there's still a lot of sexy fun, it's going to go some very different places than Too Much Love.