This short penultimate chapter breezes through 22 years as young Local Boy naturally ages into the timeline to become his future self at his daughter’s wedding in the year 2000. Going into this novel the plan was to tell a Timely Persuasion adjacent story from Local Boy’s point of view. That’s exactly what I did—including skipping over most of the years TP skipped. The skipping wasn’t pre-determined, but once I got there naturally it had a nice synergy.
The other payoff here is when the light bulb goes off and Local Boy finally understands what the redhead means about how time travel ties to manipulating memories—but he also takes a chance and is able to prove he does still have free will. The stunt to illustrate this is ensuring events play out like they did in the other book / in previous chapters of this book1 as far as any POV character believes, while still letting things expand or change just outside of those pages.2
With time running out on these commentaries and not much more to talk about, here seems as good a place as any for final thoughts on how I maybe could’ve got this down to 27 chapters. This is another case where I chose a cliffhanger over a contained scene, though realistically 33 & 34 could be 1 chapter. Continuing that line of thought chronologically:
6 & 7 (Open Mic at the Coffee Shop)
15 & 16 (Old Man & Redhead separately appear to Local Boy back to back)
18 & 19 (“That’s not your wife!” and immediate aftermath)
24 & 25 (Local Boy becomes his older self in the 1990s)
29 & 30 (Another Open Mic at the Coffee Shop)
31 & 32 (Taking the van to the storage unit)
33 & 34 (The End)
Upside to that consolidation is accomplishing the cheap trick of landing on exactly 27 chapters for a book about the 27 club. Downside was some longer chapters & some pacing issues. It would also move the 6-6-7-7-8 cadence of the part based structure to 6-5-5-5-6, which putting it down in writing I might’ve liked better. Dang it!3
Tidbits:
- Opening with “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…” is a callback to an opening of a chapter of L Extreme that calls back to the opening of a chapter from Timely Persuasion while also doing its own callback to a different chapter .4
- “A prequel to my sequel which somehow became an epilogue” is a pretty good meta summary of the relationship between Done Gone and Timely Persuasion.
- Writing Timely Persuasion back in 2003, the tan van kept turning up with my future self whispering “trust me, this will be important later.” Here it’s important now. You might think it’s a retcon from the other book’s reveal of the van’s ties to the creepy hospital, but you’d be wrong.
- “Volunteering for extra credit” calls back to all the times Local Boy reminded us school weren’t for him. He’s ready to put in the studious work, turning a page and teeing us up to revisit yet another scene in the grand finale.
Check out Local Boy Done Gone
FOOTNOTES:
- A time traveling version of the boy we now know to be named Carter Timmons witnesses himself getting taken home by his father after objecting at his sister’s wedding. The pair almost getting hit by a tan van en route to their own car, but dad doesn’t blame the van. ↩︎
- A lot of inspiration came from Back To The Future Part II when Marty & Doc return to 1955 and are running around the edges of the first film in ways that make you wonder if they were there all along. ↩︎
- I’m mostly kidding. I’m happy with the final structure, at least for now. ↩︎
- It’s all connectal. ↩︎