I picked a terrible time to pause my writing of Too Much Love.
In all fairness, there haven't been many good times to pause. TML is essentially a story about prolonged hyperaccelerated personal growth. Most of the characters in it are in their late teens or early twenties - a time where they are primed to convert whatever resources they can get their hands on into their own adult selves. Applying functionally limitless resources to that formula means that who Nick, Max, Arwen, Lev, and the twins are changes from day to day.
That being said, Chapter 59 is the beginning of the Hamilton weekend and has a huge number of moving parts all suddenly moving much faster. Nick is leaving his first real imprint on the Stone family. Verity is having her "coming out." Shelby is spending her last weekend in New York before heading off to college. Pilar is more fully subsuming herself into the sex goddess she wants to be.
In this moment, writing a scene requires me to hold in my head who each character is, who they're becoming, who they think they're becoming, and what they've done so far. It's very easy for the writing to get flat and expository and for character actions to seem unjustifiably inconsistent with what's come before.
The bulk of chapter 59 revolves around one of Nick's biggest transitions to date. Each time I sat down to write it, it didn't feel like something Nick would do. I hadn't sold it to myself. I put aside five drafts of those scenes, trying to get them right.
But, to paraphrase Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, even though the fifth castle burned, fell down, then sank into the swamp, the sixth castle held strong. I sent a draft of chapter 59 to my editor this morning and started in on chapter 60 somewhat later this morning.
That being said, the events of Too Much Love are currently happening in September, 2015 - more than four years before today's date. And there are plenty of stories I'd like to tell (both about the Stone family and others) that happen after that. I need to write other things. For a while, I thought that meant wrapping up TML at the end of the Hamilton weekend and telling the story of Nick and his friends in smaller vignette-sized stories, but that felt too unsatisfying. Then, I considered Halloween, but it has the same issue of having more open threads than completed ones.
What I'm going to try going forward is a bit unprecedented, I think. Rather than try to turn Too Much Love into something it's not, my plan is to interweave future chapters with other stories - some Stone-related, some not. Some of them will happen years after the events of the chapter they're coming out in parallel to and may even reference events planned for dozens of chapters in the future of TML.
To serve that end, I'm working out a rough outline of where Nick's story goes from September 2015 on. I expect Too Much Love to wrap up around December 2016, but that won't be the end of Nick's story and certainly not the end of the Stones.
I don't know if TML will ever be a coherent story or just serve as a massive "backstory document" for other, more compact stories. All I know is that there's no reason to stop creating it as long as I'm enjoying writing and you're enjoying reading.