With three days of work this week, I poured myself into getting a first full draft of Jekyll and Hyde written. I pretty much succeeded.
(No relation to the topic, I just like showing photos of Wisp).
There’s still lots and lots of work to do and some of the later chapters need heavy revision. I’m not completely satisfied with the chapter breakdown (some chapters are too short, some have the wrong mix of movies). But getting to a milestone makes me feel I got something accomplished this month, despite all the vet appointments, errands and contractors that got in the way. It gets me excited to surge forward in December.
Other than that, nothing much written (but that’s enough, right?) as the Local Reporter had a week off. Over at Atomic Junk Shop I had two posts related to the Silver Age collections I reviewed Sunday. One looked at two good Superman stories dealing with Superman lookalikes —
— while the other looked at how DC’s science fiction anthologies in the early 1950s anticipated the Silver Age. For example giving us an early, if unsuccessful superhero in Captain Comet —
— and in one story pitting him against a prototype for Gorilla Grodd.
On the medical front, mixed news. My iridotomy was a success, which is good for my eyeballs. Trixie’s new medicine has improved her energy and reduced her cough. Even if she doesn’t look energetic in this photo, trust me she is.
Plushie’s surgeon, unfortunately, agrees with our vet that he’s not healing as well as we’d hoped. Worst case, more surgery and longer recovery; best case, he’s just healing slower than expected. We have another recheck next month. Prayers and positive thoughts appreciated.
Of course TYG and I also had Thanksgiving yesterday. A quiet, lazy day with a big lunch at Cafe Parizade, which hosts a massive vegan event every year. Awesome food; it was difficult but I stopped just short of discomfort.
All rights to images remain with current holders. Superman cover by Curt Swan, Strange Adventures by Murphy Anderson.
Another week where Jekyll and Hyde work did not go as smoothly as I’d hoped. Still doable to make end of year deadline to finish, but I feel a little more stressed than I did Nov. 1.
Once again we had a swarm of contractors, errands and dog stuff, plus the added time for added PT — not a lot, but it adds up. And my iridotomy Monday, which took way longer than I expected. The treatment itself was quick but the waiting room was slammed, possibly because they’re going out of network next month for Cigna (that’s why I made sure to come in early).
The laser treatment itself was unpleasant, feeling like static electricity coursing through my eyeballs. I’ll go back next week to see if it worked — as it was a pre-emptive strike, I can’t judge by symptoms getting better, as I didn’t have any.
Speaking of better, Plushie isn’t improving as much as the vet hoped. Not like “OMG, we have to amputate!” — in fact we can start taking him for short walks again (and we have). But not where they’d like him to be, so we’re making an appointment with the surgeon for next week.
My work for The Local Reporter was more political than usual. ICE is in the area and the Carrboro Town Council spoke out in support of immigrants. I also wrote about PORCH, one of the local hunger-fighting groups and how food insecurity is getting worse. My third story was about a legendary local activist, Braxton Foushee, getting a state award for decades of work.
Once again the amount of time I put in The Local Reporter exceeded my plans, including a couple of interviews for stories that won’t happen until December. But that means I don’t have to worry about getting them in late. I always prefer to stay well ahead of deadline.
Fingers crossed that despite the doctor and vet appointments next week, it’ll be productive. Local Reporter’s off for a week, so that’ll help. And despite the underperformance on Jekyll and Hyde I feel oddly positive about it. It is taking shape, the shape is good and it can be done. And it will be. I want to start 2026 with fresh projects and get back to writing fiction.
The work I did on Jekyll and Hyde this week was good but it didn’t move anywhere near as fast as I need.
(Snowdrop eyes our Roomba warily)
Part of that is that I should have starting rewriting my initial entries a lot sooner. I didn’t. So now there’s more work and it’s taking longer. Part of it’s that I had a few distractions this week. Lack of sleep (I think the time change is still messing with me). Plushie’s recheck on Monday (he’s doing well). Increased numbers of dog exercises every day — a small addition to my schedule but it sometimes doesn’t feel like it. More contractors to deal with.
(Plushie is back to enjoying his rolls in the grass).
And my efforts to confine my newspaper work to one day of the week didn’t work, which always leads to the work expanding more than it should. I did get in a good story on Carrboro’s efforts to manage invasive plant species and why it matters. My second story isn’t online yet.
To top it off our olive-oil sprayer met Mr. Kitchen Tile this morning so we spent around 45 minutes mopping up olive oil, sweeping up glass and then vacuuming. Which made it way hard to get my brain back on track. Sigh.
I wound up skipping the Genre Book Club I’ve been attending and I moved my dental appointment next week (routine checkup) to January, after the book is in.
My writing at Atomic Junk Shop was all reposts of stuff here so no need to link. But if you’re on FB you can check out my online Con-Tinual panel on enduring comic-book favorites. One of mine was Scooby-Doo Team-Up (cover by Dario Brizuela) for reasons I blogged about here.
Usually, for obvious reasons, I try not to schedule lots of contractors and errands for the same week, unless I’m taking a day off to deal with all of them. This week, though? Monday, Trixie’s health checkup. Tuesday, a contractor checking our basement dehumidifier still runs smoothly. Except after waiting for them (and trying not to be embroiled anything when they showed) they had to postpone to Wednesday. Wednesday? The first contractor, plus a foundations checkup. Thursday? Trixie in for some scheduled tests.
That’s a lot of extra time and distraction. Plus somehow we had the housecleaners assigned to come Thursday and neither of us put it on the calendar. That meant three hours sitting in the spare bedroom comforting the cats. It’s surprisingly numbing. And because the cleaners were three hours late, that threw my schedule further off (I postponed stuff because I didn’t want to be in the middle of it when they arrived). I made a run to Dudley’s eye doctor to pick up some of his various drugs today; I could have done that yesterday if I’d known I’d have the time. And Trixie had to wait twonextra hours at the vet before we could reach her.
Plus the effect of a couple of nights of really bad sleep.
On the plus side, the house inspection stuff went great: no massively expensive repairs required. Trixie’s Monday recheck found she needs added daily exercises but no major problems. Thursday, we won’t know for a while. And if nothing else, having the cleaners in on a day when I was already off my game may mean more productivity later this month
The end result? I got some good work done on Jekyll and Hyde though nowhere near what I wanted to. I also sold two copies of Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast — whoever bought them, thank you!
I also turned in two stories for The Local Reporter, one on the biannual Carrboro record show, and one on Mental Health First Aid. At Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about Jack Kirby’s Forever People and about the story rebooting Flash’s wife Iris into a Time Traveler. How the CW missed that when it’s Flash show had so much time travel, I’ll never know.
Working like crazy I got a very crude first draft of Jekyll and Hyde.
By which I mean I’ve assigned everything to chapters (some entries will be shifted around to make the lengths right) and taken all my scribbled (okay, typed) notes and turned them into synopses and commentary. Not all of it’s well written and I still have some things to watch (Hulk MCU movies for instance) but I set that as my goal and I pulled it off.
No particular trick to it, just that I prioritized writing and really made myself focus. Go me. This will make it easier to balance time next month between viewing stuff (TV, movies that need rewatching) and rewriting.
That was 90 percent of my writing week. The rest included little stuff (applying to next year’s ConGregate and ConCarolinas cons) and The Local Reporter. One of my articles was on an ongoing Carrboro lawsuit against Duke Energy. Another article dealt with a site offering Chapel Hill High School’s digitized annuals online and the differences between 1925 and 1973. At Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about Jack Kirby’s Hairies, successes and failures in late 1970 Marvel Comics —
— and the moment Superman discovered all kryptonite on Earth was common iron!
In other news Dudley is feeling very lively, enough to think he can run down the stairs. We have so far prevented this. Stitches come out Saturday which will be good (no risk of it getting infected if he rolls or licks it). Several weeks of care after that.
Plus I finally got my iridotomy eye surgery scheduled!
So a pretty good week. And as it’s Halloween, have a closing image:
Comics art by John Buscema (top) and Curt Swan. All rights to images remain with current holders.
Due to Plushie’s leg problems I often wind up sitting in the cage so he can snuggle with me. As I’m Trixie’s human, she’s not happy about this.
I do my best to give her extra snuggles when we’re sitting together.
Plushie’s surgery was Tuesday. I took it off and tackled various odds and ends as I couldn’t get my head in the game for any writing. Happily Plushie came through it like a trooper. It was necessary too, as the surgeon cleared out a couple of other problems in the knee area. Oh, and our insurer came across and will cover around 90 percent. Yay.
Wednesday was a rough day; if I hadn’t been working on a Local Reporter story about Carrboro city council I’d probably have taken that one off too. The big problem was that Plushie cannot be allowed to lick his wound. They gave us a sleeve to put on the leg and he reacted very aggressively to having the bad place touched, almost biting TYG. Worse, we have to take it off when he goes out, then put it back on again. Eventually we resolved things simply by switching to the cone of shame. He can’t get the leg and he’s much more compliant. He’s also on heavy drugs so in between meals or walks, he largely dozes and I can sit with Trixie.
Other than Plush Dudley, what’s up? Well, the week started on a disappointing note. I’d made an appointment to donate blood as soon as I was able (there’s a four-month wait between power red donations). It was a close place so I got there with plenty of time, the line moved fast, I was hooked up … and then the phlebotomist kept telling me I was squeezing too hard (they have us squeeze a sponge strip to keep the blood going) and my muscles were interfering. And that I was moving my arm, same problem. Sure enough, the machine got part way through the process, then stopped. I suggested trying again; the rather pissed off phlebotomist told me no, I’d used up my slot and would have to wait the usual four months, event though I’d barely donated.
I left in a bad mood. I’ve never had that motion problem before; have I developed some tic that’s causing a problem? Are my veins scarring over enough that even slight motion is a problem? Either of these is possible, though it’s also possible my phlebotomist screwed up in some fashion.
Sunday, though, TYG and I took a nice walk around a nearby lake, though the water was low.
The work week was good. Website glitches stopped me posting anything at Atomic Junk Shop but my two Local Reporter stories from last week are up, one about a 55-year-old Carrboro daycare center and one on Carrboro’s challenges to development.
And then there was Jekyll and Hyde. I’ve now got a solid rough draft of 60,000 words. There’s more to come but realizing how much writing I’ve done makes me feel much better about my progress. Still more work ahead, of course, but I’ll get there.
Which is to say this was a week of solid but unspectacular progress. Sufficient but no “I can coast now!” But “sufficient” is good.
It was an oddly disorganized week, though I can’t pin down why. Sunday afternoon it started with a zoom call for the new Ceaseless Way anthology. We’re not making the original deadline for getting all our stories in but we’re only slightly behind, much closer than we managed on the first book. We’re also beginning the critiquing, starting with my friend Ada Milenkovic Brown’s stories (I’ll get to them next week). Then come mine.
I got three Local Reporter stories in, though none of them are on the website yet. I also got back into the swing of Atomic Junk Shop blogging after several weeks away: one on the Sub-Mariner’s 1970 engagement, one on changing creative teams of the same era and one with cool comics images and the stories behind them.
Then there’s Jekyll and Hyde. I got a couple more chapters finished, completed watching Dark Shadows (er, that is, the portion relevant to my book), and watched the two Incredible Hulk TV pilot movies. Next week, more focus on writing, less on TV.
We’ve submitted the Plush One’s appeal for his CCR damage to the insurer but I’m still waiting on my eye doctor to deal with the insurance preapproval or to give me the information to handle it. Their office says it’s a billing-office problem, billing-office says not; given this was the doctor’s recommendation and they’re getting paid for it — it’s not like I’m challenging a bill — I’m baffled why this is such a slog.
Plushie is holding up well — if anything, he’s quite lively as he adjusts to his new situation. Still very needy so I sit with him in the cage a fair amount. As the vet said, he would probably end up okay if we didn’t give him the surgery but we think the outcomes are better this way. It’s next week, followed by a long stretch of recuperation. And then hopefully. as normal as our addled doggie ever gets.
I do feel a little dispirited realizing the year is ending and finishing Jekyll and Hyde will be the only goal I accomplish. I will have it done, and that’s something, but at my age the sense of running out of time constantly gnaws at me. But if I can focus as effectively on my writing next year … we’ll see.
Ceaseless Way cover by GetCovers based on concepts by Arden Brooks. Comics images by Jack Kirby (top) and Sal Buscema. All rights to images remain with current holders.
After his three-day binge, we had no choice but to throw him in the drunk tank.
Seriously, he’s fine. And behaving reasonably well, given he’s stuck in the cage. Fortunately his pain meds leave him sleeping a lot. Physically he’s feeling good enough he wants to jump, run, etc. We do not give him the chance. And I’m getting better at giving him all his added new exercises.
This week, I managed my time better than last week, despite another wave of distractions: some questions about Plushie’s surgery and insurance coverage, trying to get information from my eye doctor for my own insurer. Running out midweek to replenish some doggie drugs. Plus one of our neighbors had surgery so TYG volunteered to walk the dog part of the time. That turned into walking morning and evening this week and part of next (she’s very fond of the dog). That throws my morning schedule off more than you might think.
Despite all that, I got some good work done. Three stories in at The Local Reporter. One about a 98-year-old local author, is fun, one of the occasional ones I write that might be enjoyable to non-locals. Above is one of the photos we didn’t use, uranium glass from her collection. The other two stories involve a long-delayed development project and the ongoing debate over making East Weaver Street a no-car zone.
I rewrote a couple of chapters from Jekyll and Hyde. I didn’t get as far as I wanted but the improvement is visible, at least to me. And I’m getting a sense of how long my chapters should be; McFarland wants them roughly equal and I think around 6,500 will do as a goal.
That was about it, as my writing projects are reporting and Jekyll/Hyde the rest of the year. No Atomic Junk Shop because of schedule conflicts last week.Oh, one thing I forgot last week: we had the power go out early Tuesday morning and it was projected to come back on after six hours, which would have spoiled everything in the fridge I bought that weekend and the food I’d cooked that day. Amazingly it came on in just three hours — food saved! But man, it’s been so long since the power was out in the night, I’d forgotten how utterly pitch black it gets. Fortunately nobody invaded from the Dark Dimension and we soon had torches and battery powered lights going.
Last weekend we had our most expensive date of the year: shopping at Costco. Fortunately we’ve done it enough not to buy more stuff than we have space for, or will use, or shouldn’t use (big bags of cookies, bad!).
And that wraps it up. Cover by Carmine Infantino, all rights to images remain with current holders.
The title comes from a 5th Dimension song about spring eventually banishing winter and love eventually brightening someone’s life. I quoted it because I’ve been thinking a lot about time this past week or so.
As I’ve blogged about a couple of times, going back to an eight-hour work day has proven successful, more so if I force myself to take regular breaks (I’m bad about that) and to put the computer down at the end of the day. But this week I came to realize that’s been balanced out by my morning schedule going belly up.
Normally I get up, read, pet cats, have breakfast and work for an hour (not in that order). A little after that, TYG comes down with the dogs. If I wake up early, I put in more time. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been more inclined to lie in the bed for a while when I wake up in the middle of the night. That’s understandable but it means I lose time, and inevitably I’m going to take naps later in the day.
The bigger problem is that TYG is putting in more work in the early morning. Typically she lets Trixie come down first, then comes down herself with Plushie, anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour later. That means we do the dog-care stuff later, followed by walkies and then I start the rest of the work day.
Theoretically if we start an hour later I should have an hour of extra work in before we start. Somehow it doesn’t happen, and so I wind up losing anywhere from an hour to 90 minutes of morning time. I think part of it is that this is a relatively new development so I still don’t anticipate the delay. I wind up not jumping back into work after cuddling Trixie because I assume it’s not going to be that long. Oops. Fortunately this is fixable; next week I shall fix it (I did pretty well this morning).
I’ve also noticed I’ve stopped paying attention to my monthly and yearly to do lists. That’s a combination of two factors I suspect. One is that a lot of items on the monthly list stay constant, like the amount I donate to charity every month, buying food for a local food bank, getting exercise daily. Another is that my writing goals are simple at the moment: write my Local Reporter stories, write Jekyll and Hyde, and that’s it. It’ll change when Sam finishes the cover for Southern Discomfort but until then, it’s pretty simple. And I keep a lot of small daily goals (exercise, putting the dogs through their exercises, remembering to apply sunscreen) in my notebook rather than on the computer.
Even before that, though, I’ve been paying less attention. Which is bad because when I’m not in rush-to-finish mode I have multiple projects a month, from actual writing to finding places to submit stories to paying sales tax. I will lose track, trust me. Clearly I need a new process. Whether that’s putting more stuff in the notebook, setting aside time to review the goals or what, I don’t know yet.
That said, how well did I use my time this week? Okay, I guess. I had lunch with a friend, an errand to get doggie drugs and one to get a minor car repair dealt with. Plus I voted.
Once again Local Reporter work sucked up a little too much time. I got one story in — an update on Carrboro’s business loan program — but the multiple other inquiries I sent out got bupkiss results? That meant I spent a good deal of time hunting for an idea for a second story, with no success. Wasted, unprofitable time. Though the inquiries should still pay off down the road.
And I did an interview this afternoon with a 98-year-old woman who’s published a book of reminiscences. She was a hoot — I’ll link to the story when it comes out.
On Jekyll and Hyde, I got every movie slotted into one or the other chapter. That will make rewriting simpler and reduces the chance I missed anything. Some of the chapters will have to be reorganized eventually but it’s a good step forward. I watched more of Dark Shadows‘ parallel world plotline and some episodes of Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde, a BBC kids’ comedy from the 1990s. Definitely thought I’d get more done. Once again I didn’t get any Atomic Junkshop posts written.
Oh, and I read a section of the book to my writers’ group. As usual the feedback was excellent.
And so the week ends. As you’ve probably guessed, all the illustrations but Trixie are time-themed. Photos from The Time Machine and Summer Time Machine Blues, comics cover by Curt Swan, paperback cover by Richard Powers. All rights to images remain with current holders.
