Another good week, by which I mean I look at what I worked on and say yes, I did accomplish something!
I wasn’t sure I would because Wednesday was a mess. After the debate the night before, I started doing the opposite of doomscrolling, reading analyses and taunting the “No, Trump won!” and “No, Haitians really are eating cats in Springfield!” people on X. Fortunately today I was back to normal.
I rewrote the first two chapters of Jekyll and Hyde, dealing with the novel and then with the silent films. The novel chapter still needs a lot of work. I know the points I want to make (obviously I’m not going to try to cover all the critical analysis of the book or provide the definitive study) but there’s a lot of them and it’s tricky arranging them. Plus some of them may work better in the introduction or in later chapters discussing the films. So I called a halt after getting it into a reasonably workable shape. I’ll revisit after a couple more chapters.
The silent film chapter, however, went smoothly. I think I got some good discussion of the 1920 John Barrymore version. I also stumbled across an article in the Journal of Stevenson Studies listing silent versions. It added a lot of detail to some I already had and included a couple I hadn’t heard of (mostly name only). The Internet can be amazing — this would have been impossible 20 years ago.
I’m 150 pages into my final rewrite of Southern Discomfort, roughly halfway. I’ve also started proofing the rewrite, going through chapter by chapter to see if my rewrite introduced any errors (yes. My protagonist is traveling through Georgia, not Georgie).
I did an article about a Carrboro bakery for The Local Reporter and two posts at Atomic Junk Shop. One was about a bunch of unrelated Marvel stories in 1969 that have the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Captain Marvel and the Avengers battling unstoppable robots. The other dealt with some stories and art from ’69 such as the SHIELD story above (page by Frank Sprinker) and the Gene Colan image below.
I’d hoped to get more done but I’m not bothered I didn’t. It was a good week and I’m only human.
Oh, and to end on an up note, my replacement crown, correctly adjusted, is finally in my mouth! Feels good.
#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.
