{"id":2612,"date":"2021-12-11T14:14:51","date_gmt":"2021-12-11T20:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/?p=2612"},"modified":"2021-12-11T14:14:51","modified_gmt":"2021-12-11T20:14:51","slug":"lx-commentary-24-love-on-a-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/lx-commentary-24-love-on-a-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"LX Commentary #24: Love On A Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Defeating the villain was (seemingly) the point of the previous chapter, but we still have 3 songs left. What’s next? It’s about to get weird…<\/p>\r\n

Just like the song says: “Love on a budget doesn’t make much sense<\/strong><\/span> anymore.”

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Admissions to amusement parks have risen to an all time high!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

A simple line, I embraced the second half of that lyric here\u2014but that’s not how it used to be. The first draft of “Love On A Budget” was one of the first sections I wrote out of order for this project, way back in the NaNoWrimo 2014 initial phase when I thought it would be one short story per song ala episodes of\u00a0The Monkees<\/em> and not a proper novel with an overarching plot. The original was deep in play by play, Abbott & Costello zany banter land riffing on the love budget. Fun in the creation phase, but not really an appropriate place to resume the C & Benji buddy comedy stuff after taking down Evilon. (Heck, I didn’t even know Evilon was going to show up when I wrote that version.)\u00a0The chapter could start in the classic C & Benji style, but had to quickly move to something else entirely.\u00a0Something that didn’t make much sense…<\/em><\/p>\r\n

Now, as a whole\u00a0L Extreme<\/em><\/a> draws on situations and names that populate Benji Hughes songs and mashes them into an original plotline featuring characters inspired by the music and the muse. But Evilon was different\u2014he’s an actual character in the\u00a0outer space\u00a0frame story setting up the brilliant\u00a0LILILIL<\/em> concept album. I was reluctant to go too much into Evilon’s backstory beyond the tiny bit of canon found in the original source recordings. but I also didn’t want to leave everything completely hanging regarding Evilon & Frank’s motivations. I especially felt a need to reveal who Frank really is\u2014another tie to\u00a0LILILIL.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\r\n

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By the author of THE BEACH comes another story inside someone’s head that includes secret messages…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

During a session attempting to let the business card scraps spell it out, a better way struck me. In Alex Garland’s novella\u00a0The Coma<\/em>, there’s random sets of ALL CAPS TEXT screamed by a loud, jittery voice to signify the narrator losing his mind. But all is not as it seems. Taking the first letter of each capped word forms a sentence expanding on the plot of the book. The technical term is an acrostic<\/a>, a form of hidden message popular in the middle ages but less common today.<\/p>\r\n

C gets struck by Lon magic once again, this time making his seemingly nonsensical ramblings spell out secret messages. The hint is when he yells out LOAB\u2014an acronym for this chapter’s namesake song, “Love On A Budget.”<\/p>\r\n

(And yes, this whole blog post contains a paragraph level acrostic confirming something suggested yet not explicitly stated in the novel…)<\/p>\r\n

Random tidbits:<\/p>\r\n