By completely unplanned coincidence, both Timely Persuasion and L Extreme have 26 chapters.1 Seemed to be the way my brain naturally plots novels, which made me think it would be neat to aim for 27 in Local Boy Done Gone—my normal endpoint plus one more to tie to the 27 Club theme.
Somehow I ended up with 34.
Part of this was intentionally aiming for shorter chapters, which I’ve alluded to a few times in these commentaries. I considered doing some re-structuring to keep the same plot but land on the magic 27 number, but I messing with the cliffhangers didn’t feel right.2 Instead I decided the whole novel could be considered Chapter 27 of Timely Persuasion3—though that sort of goes against my “read in either order” goal.
So it’s just a book about time travel and the 27 Club told in 5 parts and 34 chapters—in this reframing choosing a title of “Doo & Dum” for #27 maybe should’ve been reconsidered…
Tidbits:
- Preliminary aside: Was Scooby-Dum Dynomutt’s secret identity?
- The broadcast history of Scooby-Doo is fascinating in how often it went off the air only to get later rebooted with the same core premise but a new title and new spin. Lucky for Local Boy he skipped over a decent chunk of the long wait.
- My first draft had Local Boy & Jimmy playing Pong in the living room together. Later I tried to find an airdate for a repeat of the “Johnny Bravo” episode of The Brady Bunch before the Scooby revival timing provided some history repeating continuity.4
- Confession: I never confirmed whether or not Shaggy actually says “ruh-roh” in this episode, but figured the odds were in my favor.
- Local Boy contemplates sending a letter to Chris Bell from Big Star in order to prevent his death.
- I know it seems like the LBCJ duo was inspired by The White Stripes or The Black Keys, but it was actually inspired by hearing Billy Joel’s pre-fame band Atilla and thinking THEY sounded like The White Stripes!
- Local 3 actually went by LEDGE in early drafts, but explaining how the band landed there felt both forced and out of character. Making it Jimmy’s secret name for them made a lot more sense.
FOOTNOTES
- TP also has a prologue & reprise; LX an epiLILILILogue. But both have 26 core chapters. ↩︎
- There was also the looming Feb 29 leap year day self-imposed deadline. ↩︎
- Following TP’s “chapters are named after song titles with numbers in them, “27 Jennifers” was on deck. ↩︎
- Once I landed on Scooby, I planned to use the literal premiere episode of Scooby & Dynomutt which aired on 9/11/76 for sister death date continuity. Later I decided to be less heavy handed via cousin Scooby-Dum’s debut a few episodes/weeks later. ↩︎