Donuts & Deadbolts Commentary

Remedied being way behind on serializing Duty Calls stories by releasing two together as “Donuts & Deadbolts” — the first in almost 6 years!

Holes (Donut Tidbits)

• I’d called this story “Doug’N Donuts” for years, but feedback it spoiled the reveal of the donut shop name plus not liking the idea of Donuts: Doug’N Donuts as the section title made me swap it.
• “Doug Zhang Seizes Opportunity” is admittedly a little lame, but pairs well with the other title we’ll address down below.¹
• Doug’s son Bobby Zhang is Shawn Smith’s road-trip companion in “Fester” and the apprentice to HJ the handyman in “Copper on Parchment”
• Nut’n Healthy as a donut name still amuses me now as much as it did when I wrote the line 15 years ago.
• Authors & actors hanging out at Doug’N includes screenwriter Allan Smithee who does just that in “Debaser”
• There’s a dentist in the Duty Calls jury pool; her story is unreleased / unnamed as I write this commentary post but she is the reason dentists come up twice.
• “Hole tone mechanism collapse” must’ve meant something when I wrote it but I can’t recall what. Maybe just vaguely time travel-y?²
• “Another round from Uncle Doug!” paraphrases an anecdote from one of my college professors. We were learning how to loop ambient background audio when editing to mask cuts and he told a cautionary tale of not noticing someone yelling “another round for uncle _____” in their room tone until after they finalized their documentary. Nate Pepper & I still randomly quote that line to each other.
• Doug’s assistant describing a break-in starts the segue to the next story, though maybe not in the way you think.
• I’m mildly obsessed with mixing cold brew coffee & lemonade—aka a Swedish version of an Arnold Palmer (Kaffelemonad) or an Algerian Mazagran.
• Doug gets his jury duty summons here, pushing him into the broader story. Early on all the Duty Calls flashbacks had this (like how many season 1 LOST flashbacks were about how everyone got to Australia), though I eventually abandoned this in favor of more variety.
• Donution — lol
• Doug imagining a waaaa-woooo siren sound segues us directly into the Deadbolt b-side…

Keys (Deadbolt tidbits)

• “Sent Packin’” also starts with onomatopoeia, as does the second act of “Copper on Parchment.” “Fester” opens with a ringing phone, and Doug’s story could have an unheard alarm clock kicking things off.
• The waiter (and the restaurant) will appear in another DC story. ROME isn’t his name, but is part of his name.
• The finale of a certain tv show debuted shortly before I published this twofer, making “…but Justin had seen stranger things” a hilarious accidental reference since the program didn’t exist at all when the line was written.
• “Deadbolted door” was shoehorned into the story at the last minute when I liked “Donuts & Deadbolts” better than “Donuts & Locks” as an overarching title.
• The locksmith story has been “on deck” as the next Duty Calls release for years, but something about it never felt quite right or ready. Finally figured out it related to Justin’s unnamed partner. Flipping their gender to show Justin’s indecision impacting his personal life was the missing link.³
• The short story “Bored to Death” from an old issue of McSweeney’s influenced Justin’s character and the general storyline here. I liked the idea of a writer in over his head as a detective, which made me explore a locksmith in over his head as an inadvertent part of a heist gone wrong. This predated that story becoming a tv series, so I guess I know how to pick ’em?
• The first draft predated smartphones, so I decided to keep Justin’s old flip phone partly out of nostalgia and party because I thought modernizing it would be boring.
• Originally I used lock and key emojis as the section breaks, but since Kindle didn’t support them subbed in the special character as a proxy for a lock picking tool.
• Calling the locksmith company SMITHLOCK⁴ of course amuses me to no end. Referring to it as containing “both of their names” was a new twist since Justin’s last name isn’t mentioned in the story. Who is Smith and who is Lock?⁵
• The narrow stone-lined alley was inspired by a very similar one behind Hungry Charley’s bar in Syracuse, NY.

FOOTNOTES

1. Another title in consideration: “DZ, This Could Be Donu-mite!” ↩︎
2. I’m pretty sure it’s a 3 or 4 year ago addition to this decade plus year old story. ↩︎
3. I guess you could call it the key… ↩︎
4. In a half finished novella titled The Commuter there’s a character with a tendency to invert compound words. That started as a Duty Calls story before spinning off, thus having a bit of DNA rub off here. ↩︎
5. Minor spoiler: The Cyclo Wiki tells us Justin is Smith, making his partner Lock. ↩︎