Nerdy, encyclopedic musical knowledge comes in handy when you have a chapter set in a treehouse in need of a song title containing an apostrophe. Bonus points that it’s also the title of Sybil Rosen’s memoir of her life with Blaze Foley (though she and/or her publisher added the missing G back in).
After recreating a scene from TP in the last chapter, I liked the idea of extending it with a previously unseen continuation. Of course checking the treehouse after the ghostly floating time traveler vanished is the most logical thing for Local Boy to do next, as is his wife coming to check on him once the dust settles (marital troubles aside). It also fits nicely with the “use the gifts you give yourself” advice I’ve always taken to heart. You’ve got a perfectly good treehouse in the backyard. Send someone up there!
Treebits:
- “But your kids are alright” is the redhead quoting The Who while referencing the subtitle for this part of the story.1
- Both versions of Quantum Leap only provided brief glimpses into how a leapee felt once they returned/regained control of their body. I enjoyed exploring that here. Mrs. Local Boy isn’t surprised to be in the treehouse, but is surprised her lip is bleeding.
- More on the etymology of the word lobodogo later. Where have we seen this before?
- Local Boy “making his remaining questions count” is him thinking he’s still on a twenty questions quota. Re-reading, this might be an accidental remnant from when they always played twenty questions. It still works so I don’t mind my past self keeping it, intentional or not.
- When I look back on Timely Persuasion, it sometimes bugs me how exposition heavy the old man’s dialogue is.2 I tried to make up for this with the redhead using field trips to show how time travel “memory hopping” works vs. just describing it.
- Did Local Boy cheat on his wife or not? The memory they visit overlaps with Local Boy’s time-aided absence, meaning he shouldn’t be here. This lends credence to the “it’s a memory” explanation the redhead keeps giving unless it’s an alternate timeline.
- The original draft had Local Boy play the song with his son in the soundcheck audience, then continued to the TP scene where his son catches him making out with Mrs. Nelson. Part of me wanted to make amends for the awkwardly written love scene from the other book, while another part didn’t want to rehash the dated “weaponizing Local Boy’s womanizing” plot thread. Giving him a copy of Timely Persuasion to read earlier solved all of it. He knows what’s going to happen if he stays here, so he can refuse without spelling it out. In a “read the books in either order” world it leaves some mystery as to what he’s refusing to do for readers who started with Done Gone.
- A related big reveal here is the redhead hasn’t annotated Local Boy’s copy of TP yet from her perspective. This opens the door to other time traveler visits also happening out of sequence. How/when did the old man come into the picture–and why is he conspicuously absent from the second half?3
- An implication of the redhead’s parting line (“No ifsandsorbuts about it, lobodogo.”) is she has knowledge of the Ifsandsorbuts concept album Local Boy considered making even though he never told her about it. And there’s that lobodogo term of endearment again…
Read Local Boy Done Gone
FOOTNOTES
- Quite the disambiguation page. ↩︎
- He is inspired by Doc Brown, so exposition is sort of the point. ↩︎
- “Those guys drive me crazy.” “What else did they teach you?” ↩︎