Thank you to everyone who wrote to ask if I was alive and well. I am.
I haven't written anything in a while. The need to be creative and specifically to write waxes and wanes with other pressures in my life and some of those other pressures have been intense.
The urge to write is getting stronger again and I've set today aside to focus on it. Here's what I'm dealing with:
* I can't not write. I can for a time put writing aside, but I've been writing fiction in one form or another for forty years.
* If I'm going to write, I really need to try to monetize it in some way so that the need to continue doesn't keep warring inside my head with the need to eat, medicate, and pay my bills.
* Too Much Love really isn't monetizable as-is. It's a shambolic monstrosity of prose - a massive continuity guide masquerading as a novel.
* Every time I think about writing something else, TML rears its head. This is in part because I want to write more in this universe (and about these characters) and part because I viscerally hate the idea of leaving it unfinished.
* There is no way to finish TML in its current form. It took me six years to cover a few months in 2015. What was contemporary AU fiction is rapidly aging into a period piece. To finish it at its current pace and in its current form would take about 2,000 more writing hours.
It's this Gordian knot that faces me pretty much every time I sit down to write. Here's how I'm going to try to cut it.
Starting with Chapter 84, the book is going to take a hard pivot. After a brief Vonnegut-esque explanation for the readers who don't follow this blog (that is to say, nearly all of them,) the story will jump forward more than four years to January 2020. The pacing will change. The perspectives will change. Chapter 85 will be written to stand alone, but also to wrap up a lot of the open threads from the beginning of the book. It will not entirely satisfy the desire for a clean narrative experience. Enormous events in the lives of Nick and his friends will fly by into backstory.
I'm hoping most of the readers will stick around through one more bruising of their expectations of what a story should be.
While I move forward, I will also be trying to work on smaller stand-alone stories for publication. A lot of what I've been planning may contain massive spoilers for the remainder of TML. I hope you'll trust me to keep the stories entertaining enough to read them anyway.