An Extreme Blog Done Gone

Welcome to Part III: Four Weddings and a Fun Era. The part title is 77% to amuse my friend Nate Pepper who introduced me to the similarly named film when it was (relatively) new, 7% a nod to a line about a funeral being a fun era in L Extreme, and 16% a factually accurate…

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…

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…

After (or maybe technically before) the first draft, I had scenes set during Local Boy’s “normal” life in the 1970s as well as excursions with the Redhead in the tan van. I knew each time LB had a vantastic adventure it would shake up his present, and roughly figured I’d sprinkle them in to one…

Part 2 promised a van & a list. Here you get both. Musically a hit list is a ranking of top tunes—but there’s also a more nefarious, entertainment agnostic meaning. The list becomes Local Boy’s obsession for the rest of the novel. Tidbit List: Check out Local Boy Done Gone

Local Boy bailed on his previous big break to take the redhead’s ride in a tan van. This break-in is even bigger—directly revisiting a scene from the previous book. I keep calling Local Boy Done Gone a standalone sequel, but in these commentary posts I also keep pointing out places where the two stories intersect….

Part II of Local Boy Done Gone is called “A Van & A List.” The list we’ll get to in a bit. The van was teased at the end of the last chapter, which ended on “It’s always about a girl” as a segue into “About an Encore.” I loved how this came together structurally….

Another non-song chapter title, invoking a musical trio while foreshadowing a few different dueling duos. We’re hitting the crossroads where the story loosely outlined in my head for years takes a hard turn in a different direction. In hindsight the breadcrumbs were there (they always are…), but this is the spot where the lost adventures…

Not exactly a song title, but here we invoke Billy Joel’s pseudonym plus a snippet of a Paul Simon lyric. No need to be coy, but why not? History repeating in a similar but not exactly the same manner when LBDG becomes LGDB is another bit straight out of the original years-old outline. Having this…

Chapters in the original Timely Persuasion used songs with numbers in the titles. Local Boy Done Gone mostly (but not always) sticks to songs but skips the numerics. Here we have a semi-lost non album Mason Jennings track, sticking with the stolen/missing song theme. Another thing I tried to do while naming chapters was segue…