We get a little time travel heavy at the start of this chapter as far as “rules” go, but later move into some hands-on fun as Local Boy revisits his origins with an eye on trying to undo them.
Other tidbits:
- I admit the cliffhanger in the previous chapter was a bit of a tease that’s quickly resolved here. But I did find it interesting to explore what may be happening to alternate timelines that are “left behind” each time a character blinks. These dangling threads are often ignored in most time travel tales.
- When the old man extends his theory to say we saw the narrator die outside the bar when he passed out, he’s actually wrong. What we really saw was the a time traveling mind controlling a drunken host, and when the sober mind vanishes he literally passes out. It always drives me crazy that “theories” presented in fiction on a whim always turn out to be true, so I intentionally made the old man be wrong for the right reason here.
- “I was wrong. And I could be wrong again” is more music from the future spoken by the old man. Fitting that it’s Paul Simon, showing that the same old favorites will continue to be followed.
- “Infinite Perfection” was a title I considered for the book based on the line in this chapter. Prior to that I was back and forth between “Timeless Persuasion” and “Timely Persuasion.” I actually Googled both at one point and decided to go with Timeless since there was a horse named Timely Persuasion, but I must have forgotten about it later and flip-flopped. The inspiration for the “Persuasion” part comes from the song “Crystal Blue Persuasion” by Tommy James and the Shondells.
- The Dad’s blink was tough to write about in the context of the book since everything else is in the first person. It didn’t make sense to break convention for this, so it had to be told from the perspective of one of the versions of the narrator. In the end I cheated a little with a third person telling followed by a first person caveat of “At least that’s the way part of my brain remembers the story now.”
- Dad’s blink is inspired by how they revisit the first movie in Back to the Future Part II.
- I’ve mentioned the possibility of a sequel previously. I have a general idea of how it would work and how it could expand upon this first story, but in all honesty I don’t really know if I’ll ever get around to writing it. However, I do know this: If there is a sequel, the title will most likely be “Nelsonification” after the secret word provided by the Doctor.
- There are 25 musical references in this chapter.
1 thought on “Commentary 24: 24 Hour Party People”