I've been absent from writing for a while. Real life and all that. This week was the first time in a while that I put (virtual) pen to (figurative) paper in a while. I've been rereading Elevated and pulling out an outline for a rewrite to be e-book ready.
I wrote an entire chapter of Too Much Love that I was really unhappy with. I tried to dissect it and kept running up against problems with the Stone Family Universe and how it got to where it is. The core trouble is that, as TML moves to a worldwide scale, the lack of any setup for the history of the world outside of the Stone family is making it impossible to tell the story I want to tell without a massive Great Gatsby style exposition dump of how that world is different from our own.
In short, the Stone "family" first appears in late seventeenth or early eighteenth century America, becomes extremely wealthy and powerful, gets involved in all sorts of major world events, and even precipitates the creation of both a new papal state in Europe and a libertarian "utopia" in the Pacific, but for all I've written about it, the world continues to choose the same leaders and make the same choices right up until 2016 when they elect a huckster named Joshua Hader to be President of the United States. Trying to write about that has been slogging through a big pile of "This Just Doesn't Work."
From the beginning, the plan with Too Much Love was to write it as a long first draft, then go back, chop it into manageable, publishable pieces, rewrite those around what I learned by writing it, and publish those. That draft turned out much, much longer than I originally planned and could easily take three more years to write if I focused on it full time. So, I'm putting SOL on hold indefinitely. I may eventually put a "capper" or two chapter on it set in 2025, but continuing to try to finish it just because I absolutely love it is keeping me from writing anything else.
Through the end of 2024, I'm going to be focused on writing for self-publication. I've been writing erotica under various pseudonyms for 20+ years now and I've always pulled back just before doing that even though it was always my intention. Right now, my focus is on getting "The Elevation of Corvus Gallicus" (a full rewrite of Elevated) ready for publication, although I'm also poking a number of short stories pulled out of SOL to see if I can get those finished in a timely fashion. I used to be able to write short stories (and to finish novels) and I need to get back to that.
TL;DR for anyone who doesn't want to slog through the above: I'm not dead. I'm starting to write again. Too Much Love will never be finished, but I'm planning to dissect it and extract the best stories into a form where I can share them with an audience that only reads finished drafts.