If people didn't do terrible and/or stupid things, we writers would have a lot less material to write about.
So many writers stand back and watch - the characters will "insist" on doing their own thing.
You're doing fine - get the story down on paper, all of it. Later, you can worry about word economy and all that. Some would argue against publishing here until the whole novel is written, revised, and polished. However, some really great novels- Henry James - Portrait of a Lady for one - were written and published one chapter at a time. Imagine having to wait a week or more for the next chapter!

first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880–81 and then as a book in 1881. It is one of James's most popular novels and is regarded by critics as one of his finest.

You can read it for free (it is so long, you may not want to), or you can read just the Intro (linked above).
James writes,

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. ..... the spreading field, the human scene, is the “choice of subject”; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the “literary form”; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist.

All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move toward “The Portrait,” which was exactly my grasp of a single character—an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in motion and, so to speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate—some fate or other; which, among the possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual—vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity.

In summary: an author CAN write and publish a chapter at a time. How long will it take the reader to reach The End? I prefer to consume whole novels in just a few days. No patience... once I enter the world an author has constructed, I prefer not to enter it, leave it, enter it again a week later leave it again.... to me it's like flying from the snowy Midwest to the tropics once a week. Stay a few hours. Fly back into the cold and snow. (Lather, Rinse, Repeat, but you are not old enough to remember that commercial...)

Again, I say, KEEP GOING, and come back later to tighten and trim. :)
From the woman who never takes her own advice, no matter how good it is. :)