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.