Back when I wrote the original Timely Persuasion I had a habit of needing to account for every minute of plot time. Even the skipped over stuff got segued with a summary. Over the years I’ve made it a point to cure myself of those old “and then, and then, and then” tendencies. Here we get a full year of a time jump disguised as an and then next morning. Sometimes you have to embrace your old tendencies while breaking free.
And then there were tidbits:
- I spent way too much time agonizing over whether or not “Scooby-Dooby-Doo” had one hyphen or two. Also, originally this title was just “Scooby-Doo, Where Were You!” like the TV show but I had trouble formatting the line wrap on the paperback to not have a single dangling word. My solution was to add the dooby. (It was intentional to end on a question mark vs. an exclamation point. The show title is exclamatory, but really shouldn’t be grammatically.)
- Musical fun fact: “Scooby-Dooby-Doo” was inspired by the way Frank Sinatra scats doo-be-doo-be -doo at the end of “Strangers in the Night“
- Art imitates life as the narrator ponders the same type of sabbatical the author sometimes takes from his jobs. They always go by so fast.
- Local Boy’s sleeping position is an homage to how Marty wakes up towards the end of Back to the Future.
- Timely Persuasion had Local Boy using AWAB as a very different acronym. 16 years later I tried to make amends with it via different/better usage here setting up him calling out the old usage later.
- It took all of my self control to not have Local Boy say he “killed the headlights and put it in neutral” when turning off the tractor.
- The Barnstormer was built in Local Boy’s backyard after he became a star in the TP1 timeline. Then a record store also replaced his parent’s house. Now the Barnstormer is still built but the house remains. Why?
- “What happened to the people and things I care about” is a lightly reworded nod to the saga cell the Quantum Leap reboot used in season 1. “That his next leap brings him back to the place and people he calls home.”
- The descriptions are of the actual episodes Scooby & Archie & The Monkees aired on September 19, 1970 — the day after Jimi Hendrix died. The bit about Jimi Hendrix opening for The Monkees on tour is also true.
- The second season of Scooby really did change the theme song singer and added a musical element to every episode. Check out every chase song below, with the OG theme as a bonus track.
Check out Local Boy Done Gone