When I first started writing Too Much Love in 2016, the long-term plan was for it to cover the two years between Nick Coyle's eighteenth and twentieth birthdays in 2015 and 2017 respectively. I knew from very early on how it would end and where Nick would be when he turned twenty.
As I wrote, I got a sense that it was going to take me a Very Long Time to write that book. Chapter 1 starts on June 25, 2015. Chapter 30 ends on July 16. At a rate of roughly 3/4 day per chapter, it would take 975 chapters to cover those two years. I didn't expect it to actually run that long, having successfully used a bit of hockey-stick pacing in Elevated with good results, but I knew it was going to take a long time.
As I kept writing, committing the Stone Family that had largely lived in my head to the page, and exploring Nick's day-to-day life, it started to dawn on me that the chapters were getting bigger and bigger and covering less time. The cast of Too Much Love is enormous and most of the characters have their own stories to tell.
If I were writing Too Much Love to publish on a deadline, I would have strapped it to the editing table, excised any of the scenes that didn't move the story towards at least one of the five major milestones I had planned for Nick's life, and tried to get the whole thing done in under 1,000 pages by the end of 2017 (real time, not story-time.)
Instead, I kept writing the story I wanted to tell and built the world I wanted to build. I added a warning to the story's frontmatter indicating that there was a good chance that I would never finish it, but every new chapter continued to get about 6-7,000 reads, so I accepted that people were continuing to enjoy what I put out.
The problems with this approach were manifold. One of the major plot points of Too Much Love was supposed to involve the terrible world-changing outcome of the US presidential election of 2016 throwing things into chaos for Nick and the people he cared about. The problem was that it wasn't the terrible world-changing outcome that actually happened.
The world of the Stones is not our world. It's very much like our world with a lot of the same problems, a lot of the same celebrities, and many common points of culture. But, while recognizable people from the real world do appear in Too Much Love, I'm not comfortable with having them do things they haven't actually done. Connie thinks Kate Moss stole her date at a party in the nineties, but we never find out if she actually did. Max and Paige toy with the idea of trying to have a threesome with Mila Kunis, but she doesn't agree to it. The most I'm comfortable with is that Kristian Nairn who played Hodor in Game of Thrones DJs the Seneschal's Ball and takes some pictures with Paige.
So, I made an executive decision early on, which I now call the Veep rule: Because the story will eventually be heavily influenced by the 2016 election and its fallout, none of the major players will be the actual human beings who ran for office, managed their campaigns, or had any real, significant role in politics that year. The Democratic nominee is not Hillary Clinton. Her progressive challenger is not Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee and does not become the 46th president of the United States.
I call this the Veep rule because on the long-running TV show Veep, none of the real presidents after Bush 43 ever appear. They just didn't happen. When asked about this in an interview, series star Julia Louis-Dreyfuss said that, in the world of Veep, Donald Trump exists, but he's probably selling shoes at an outlet mall in Seacaucus (or words to that effect.)
So, in the world of the Stones, Donald Trump isn't involved in politics by 2016. Instead, he made the mistake of trying to fuck over Inez's father in on a business deal in the early 1990s and the Stones buried him in a hole so deep it went all the way through to China (instead of the hole he dug himself in the real world which came out in Russia.)
The reason I'm mentioning this now is because the events of chapter 64 of Too Much Love suggested a good stopping point for book one. There's actually an end in sight. It's still many chapters out, but the realization that this story will end in early 2016 has given shape to the story as a whole. For one thing, the 2016 election doesn't happen in this book. For Nick and his crew who are so wrapped up in their own thing, it's only a distant blip on the horizon. That also means I can break out the election, its consequences, and a particular Simon-driven storyline into their own book. And I can juggle planned events around for Jester's Ransom, the Jesse-centered book, to coincide with the end of Too Much Love and the beginning of its as-yet-unnamed sequel.
Now that I know where Too Much Love ends, I'll be changing the synopsis and the end notes. I really should change the title as well since the part of Nick's story that "too much love" refers to doesn't really happen until Book 2, but I've only changed it once and, as I learned from The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, people only have so much tolerance for such shenannigans.
But the main reason I mention this is that I'm just starting to write Chapter 67 and it lays some of the groundwork for the central conflict of book 2. The scene is fictional, but it has many of the details of a real, politically-charged event from the last few years, right down to the cheap plastic tiki torches.
I'm pretty sure anyone who reads me in spite of my politics has abandoned Too Much Love by now, but if you are, you haven't, and you're the kind of person who believes there are good people on both sides of every argument, you might want to stop now.