Reasons this ended up being a short chapter vs. combined with the preceding and/or following:
a) The break points made dramatic sense.
b) I really wanted to use the Double Trouble title, which actually references my favorite Breeders bootleg and not Stevie Ray’s band.
b2) The live version of “Saints” here is especially good —>
c) Short chapters (theoretically) encourage binge-y page turning.
Tidbits:
- Local Boy’s son & older self time travel in a ghostly manner where only Local Boy can see them, setting up the Quantum Leap nod to the recurring gag of onlookers thinking Sam is having an unhinged conversation with himself.
- I never thought to try to stop Nelson’s parent’s wedding before either.
- July 9, 1971 was the hottest day of July in many places in the northeast, and it was still over 80 degrees after sunset. Historic temps from Weather Underground:
- “28IF was off by one” is a known flaw in the Paul is Dead theories. The fact that he’d really be 27 played well for the story here.
- I jumped the gun a little ending the last chapter commentary with the cryptic hint, but Kuco Mist is the thing the son needs to “go check on” before abruptly disappearing so I’ll drop the same hint again.
- The plot reason for the “Double Trouble” chapter title refers to the old man also making a temporal appearance here right after the son leaves. If the next chapter merged with this one I’d need to call it Triple Trouble.
- Early drafts had Local Boy frequently referring to “that book my son wrote.” It was established at the end of TP the book existed out in the world so it made sense Local Boy would read it eventually. At the same time, I was struggling on how to both keep this story mostly standalone while still referring to events of the other book. “Why don’t you just give him a copy?” was a fun meta solution to this conundrum. I minimized early references to just let him read the dang thing around the midpoint.
- There’s a weird bug in the data feed some online bookstores get from Ingram that writes my last name in ALL CAPS. When I reported it I was told the system thinks CIVI is a Roman numeral, so it forces it to be all caps. It doesn’t completely make sense–50 plus five minus one plus one isn’t a valid roman numeral–but it’s still sort of cool in a randomly awesome way. Hence the “Roman num de plum.”
- “What am I supposed to do with a book?” “Read it!”