The title of this chapter comes from the 2020 album by The Strokes, featuring cover art by 27 Club member Jean-Michel Basquiat. Here it represents Local Boy’s reluctant return to (ab)normal life after losing time after his adventures with the redhead. It’s also the term I used to describe COVID lockdown, apparently inspired by this album title even if I forgot that was the origin until now.
These two paintings have nothing to do with each other, but I didn’t have any relevant visuals prepared for this post and thought the birds staring at each other looked cool.
Tidbits:
- The chapter title definitely came before Local Boy’s related lyrics. “Abnormally normal, casually formal, I once quit a band ‘cause stealin’s immoral.”
- My non-author life bleeds into the novel with the observation “what people want, what they need, and what they ask for tend to be two or three different things.” Keeping that in mind is the secret to taking feedback from users on product feature suggestions. It’s all about the questions behind the ask, as Local Boy astutely observes.
- Not wanting to introduce the characters of Local Boy’s parents into the plot, I made it a running gag for their trip to Europe to be perpetually extended.
- I’d totally hire a service called Lawn Boy Does Grass to mow my lawn. Wouldn’t you?
- Every now and then someone who read Timely Persuasion will tell me they love how I included a reference to a certain lyric even if I didn’t realize it was a lyric when I wrote it. The phrase “conscientious deflector” here is a good example. I thought it was just a play on words–but almost every Google result is lyrics from a band called Touché Amoré (who do not sound like I expected from their name.)
- Similarly, I thought I was slyly referencing a Yo La Tengo album title with Stuff Like That There, not a song by The King Sisters Local Boy could have awareness of.
- Local Boy’s research project mirrors his future son spending time at the library in search of blinking beacons in the original TP.
- A loose rule I had for names on the list was each had to have a plausible explanation for dying (or not dying) at 27 in an alternate timeline. A few of those are casually explained here as factual. Billie Holiday was warned by the government not to play “Strange Fruit” but continued to do so anyway. Sam Cooke was in a car accident in 1958 with Lou Rawls (and Lou Rawls really was pronounced dead but actually lived.)
- Respect your greats: The songwriting team of Giant, Baum and Kaye wrote over 40 songs for Elvis, including “(You’re The) Devil in Disguise” referenced here in reference to the redhead.
- “A phonographic memory does you no good if the record skips” is a line I still dig as a chapter & part closer.
Check out Local Boy Done Gone