Contains minor spoilers for Too Much Love Chapters 63 and 64 and bigger ones for the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series was an epic, world-spanning saga with hundreds of significant characters, a vast backstory, and a million details to line up. It eventually ran to fifteen books and each book average about 800 pages in paperback.
Compared to Wheel of Time as a whole, Too Much Love is a light summer read, but as soon as I finished writing chapter 63, I worried about a possible parallel.
Casual research doesn't bring up the details, but a running theme of WoT fandom was the notion of Mat being stuck under the wall. Near the end of one book, Matrim Cauthon is trapped under a collapsed wall. Matrim is a major character, one of the core companions of the main character, Rand Al'Thor, and a fan favorite. Engaged readers wanted to know what happened to Mat next.
A few years later, the next book came out and Mat wasn't in it. He would be in the next book, but there was something like five years between him getting trapped under that wall and getting out. The phrase "and Mat's still stuck under the wall" entered the lexicon.
It took me four months to write and post chapter 63 after finishing chapter 64. Life, a job change, murder hornets, the pandemic, and the lockdown happened. A few people made some half-hearted attempts to set my neighborhood on fire.
Still, considering how I ended chapter 63, I felt like it would be excessively cruel to make my readers wait months or even weeks to see what happened next. This apparently spurred me to new heights of creativity because chapter 64 is already with my editor.
Mat stayed under the wall for years, but Nick will get out of the elevator in short order.
Although, to keep some parallel, Churchmouse does not actually appear in this chapter.