Not yet for Southern Discomfort but they’ve picked my cover for Watching Jekyll and Hyde.
This is the poster for the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that one Fredric March an Oscar. It’s not what I suggested but it looks good — and I trust McFarland to pick the right image.
They seem to be moving quite fast on this. It may not be too long before I get the galleys to proof.
All rights to image remain with current holder.
Filed under Nonfiction, Writing
The first twist: I was supposed to be at Mysticon in Roanoke. I was last there right before the covid shutdown; after things opened up again Mysticon didn’t (loss of some of the key conrunners was a big issue). I figured it was gone for good but no, here it is!
Only I’m not because we’re having a winter storm hit and it looks like Durham-to-Roanoke will be fimbulwintered. It’s possible it won’t be that bad but driving on ice is not in my skill set. And the odds look excellent that when I came home, our subdivision would still be unsafe driving even if the main roads had been cleared off. So I canceled.
In a sense, it’s a win. I didn’t have a table to sell books so from a monetary standpoint this would have been a loss. And money has been flowing out too fast the past couple of months. Lots of pet meds, a ramp for Plushie when he was recovering from his CCL tear (turns out we didn’t use it), really steep electric bills … so spending money on what would have been a fun vacation more than a business trip might not be the best thing.
Only it’s not a win because I was really looking forward to going. It’s been a hectic, intense month with lots of writing, doggy care, much of last weekend being solo doggy care (TYG had some alumni activities she attended) so a break would have felt very nice. It’s not like I can come up with some fun activity as an alternative break this weekend because we’ll be snowed in. Sigh.
The other twist is that of my colleagues at The Local Reporter jumped ship for an outlet where he can focus on sports reporting so my editor asked me to take over covering Chapel Hill as well as Carrboro. That’s a good thing — more money — but it will cut into my time for my own projects. This was the first week I blew any of those goals — nothing done on Impossible Takes a Little Longer — though that’s also because I spent one day this week also dealing with errands (get dog drugs and some extra food before the roads are covered in ice and snow) and various household obligations (getting paperwork to our new groomer).
Still, I got stuff done. Some promotional paperwork for McFarland on Watching Jekyll and Hyde, responding to Sam about the new cover design, and several Local Reporter pieces: a Chapel Hill lawsuit settled, prepping for the frozen weather, Carrboro’s plan to close one road on weekends, and other road plans. I worked on Obolos, one of my short stories for the new collaborative anthology, adjusting according to the feedback from my collaborators. Over at Atomic Junk Shop I looked at proposed new costumes for the Legion of Superheroes and discussed the moral implications of Jekyll and Hyde.
I also picked up Oh the Places You’ll Go which I haven’t looked at in months. One of my goals for this year is to get almost-finished stories like this one done and out into the world, whether it’s submitting to others or putting them into an anthology of my own. I got through most of the story but then I hit the ending. It needs fixing; fixing may require killing a couple of scenes that I really like. Due to my newspaper work I didn’t have enough time to decide.
On the dog front, good news. After weeks of Plushie in his cage —
— the vets have told us it’s time to let him out and “let him be a dog.” He’s been having great fun running around and sleeping on the couch (his fave spot) though we’ve carefully fenced him in so he has to use ramp. Trixie had her stitches removed from her biopsy so she’s free to get back to normal too. Yay!
Now comes the weekend and (probably) the ice and snow. Send positive thoughts that our power stays on, or at least doesn’t go off for too long.
A few last movies I rewatched for Watching Jekyll and Hyde.
Rewatching DR. JEKYLL’S DUNGEON OF DEATH (1979) confirmed that it’s the kind of sleazy low-budget crap that would have gone straight to video a few years later. Along with testing his ancestor’s formula for unleashed aggression on kidnapped guinea pigs (in a rare moment of sanity in this subgenre, Jekyll points out that self-testing is a stupid risk to take), Jekyll is raping the captive woman who once rejected him, leching on the sister he lobotomized (and gaslighting her that she’s a Hideous Scarface) and plotting revenge on a professor for reasons we never learn. Despite assuring us this takes place on a Vast Estate, the one or two shots we see outside are a suburban street; the eponymous dungeon is Jekyll’s basement. “We both know that genius is born of madness.”
THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1960) improves slightly on rewatching – Dawn Addams is better than I gave her credit for — but ultimately still falls flat. Having Hyde (Paul Massie) attempt to win back Jekyll’s faithless wife (Addams) from shameless cad Christopher Lee is a great set up but I don’t know the characters well enough to care (did Mrs. Jekyll ever love Henry? Did Henry ever love her before he became an obsessive mad scientist?). I do like the trope reversal at the end, with Hyde struggling to purge himself of Jekyll only to lose when Jekyll resurfaces. That’s all to recommend this other than Christopher Lee’s performance as a complete weasel. “We English never know what we feel.”
For all Amicus producer/screenwriter Milton Subotsky wanted I, MONSTER (1972) to be The Most Faithful Adaptation, the most interesting idea is to make Christopher Lee’s Dr. Marlowe a practicing psychiatrist (as opposed to the standard approach of providing charity medical care or focusing on research) whose frustration with conventional psychotherapy leads to drug experiments to cut through human repression …
I do wonder if Subotsky wasn’t influenced by Two Faces as Dr. Marlowe’s belief (Subotsky renamed the leads in the belief audiences wouldn’t come to a Jekyll and Hyde film) that Evil Is Ugly could easily be refuting Two Faces screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz’s belief Evil Should Be Sexy (alternatively it could be a way to rationalize why the drug changes Marlowe physically). After watching this I decided it was impossible to pull off a faithful adaptation until Jean Renoir proved me wrong. With Richard Hurndall as Lanyon and Michael des Barres as a street punk who picks the wrong toff to rough up. “What is more to the purpose — I’ve had a lesson.”
I’m glad I rewatched JEKYLL (2007) as I don’t think I appreciated on first viewing how much it riffs on the March/Tracy template, sometimes in ways that are not obvious (like Tracy and March, Matt Keeslar’s Jekyll reveals his split identity to the Bad Girl before killing her, though in this case it’s unintentional). One reason this doesn’t work for me is that Keeslar isn’t a convincing Hyde, and I can’t buy that a former, hard-partying wild man (that comes from Stevenson, of course) would be that unnerved to find the stripper Bad Girl turns him on.
That said, this is one of the more contemporary adaptations, incorporating computer games, Utterson as a female BFF for Jekyll and no slut-shaming of the stripper. It has its merits, just not enough of them. “This is the moment — the single incident that defines the rest of your life.”
I rewatched the Tracy version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941) after reading a letter from Joe Breen (the top enforcer for the Production Code) warning that when Tracy whips Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner in one hallucination sequence, the whip mustn’t be seen striking the women. That’s the kind of hairsplitting the Production Code specialized in, but it works: I was genuinely surprised to realize the whip never does land — all we see is Tracy’s Jekyll cracking a whip while he rides in a hansom cab pulled by the two women.
I was also intrigued by Breen’s directive a second hallucination sequence cut out all scenes with “the girl and the swan” — they did and I’ve had no luck researching what it was.
The 1980 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is definitely in my list of top adaptations. David Hemmings is excellent as a middle-aged Jekyll, a clergyman’s son wracked by guilt over his addiction to banging sex workers and hopeful his miracle drug will cleave off his sinful side and let him become pure. Instead it turns him into a younger, devil-may-care Hemmings by the simple expedient of ditching the middle-aged false whiskers and poundage; not only does he have more fun but Jekyll’s fiancee finds him way more charming as Hyde. Discounting gender flip adaptations (Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde), this is the only Hyde who goes for men as well as women. Even there we only see one male sex worker providing services (I’m guessing Hyde stiffs him on his pay because of Jekyll’s guilt about M/M sex). With James Bond’s Q, Desmond Llewelyn, as the ever-doomed Sir Danvers Carew. “I never thought the pleasures of the flesh were the work of the devil.”
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Movies
Which is to say, another hectic but productive week. We’ll talk the hectic first.
We spent the first half of the week dealing with Trixie still caged for her leg surgery. Yesterday we took down the cage. We still want to discourage her from jumping and she still wears the cone of shame for another week, but she can get up and snuggle with me on the couch now, so she’s much happier.
Plush Dudley got the thumbs up from his physical rehab doctor (that’s him in their waiting room above) that he can gradually assume normal activity. We were supposed to get a confirmation from his leg surgeon but they had a schedule conflict so TYG will have to take Dudley in next week (and to the surgeon’s Raleigh office — had it happened on schedule it would have been around the corner at our regular vet’s). Still, we’re comfortable letting him go up and down the outside steps without being carried, which is a load off TYG’s back. (I’m still carrying Trixie but I’ve learned to minimize the strain on my bursitis elbow).
Tuesday we had in an electrician to check out two problem lights in the kitchen. Easy fix (pricey, but preferable to doing it ourselves) but it did take time out of my morning to interact with him.
Thursday I finally had the physical rehab session that got canceled Jan. 2, when I’d scheduled it so I’d be off work. Fortunately it’s quite close, and the session was productive. My therapist mapped out some exercises to do daily, gave me some other advice (don’t rest my shoulder on my pillow, support my elbow better when I’m writing) and sent me home. The exercises feel like they’re working, though obviously one morning isn’t a significant sample.
Less fortunately I’ll have two more sessions this month and two in early February, adding to my already busy schedule. But if it makes the bursitis go away, I’m all for it.
Once again, the writing flourished despite the obstacles. Having gotten around 12,000 words rewritten on Impossible Takes a Little Longer I did the same with Let No Man Put Asunder this week. These are the earlier, more polished chapters so it’s not that astonishing an accomplishment — except unlike last year around this time, I feel there’s significant improvement going on, not just minor tinkering. Let’s hope that continues.
I completed my rewrite of Savage Adventures up through 1940, which is to say I’m 2/3 done. Woot! And I got the latest cover design from Sam, though I haven’t had a chance to think about it yet.
Writing for The Local Reporter was very busy. I had multiple different interviews through the week which isn’t the way I like to roll — it’s much better to have them all squeezed into a small block of time. Still, I got three stories in: a profile of Carrboro’s firefighter of the year; a look at the Carrboro Southern film festival; and an interview with one of the documentarians showing a film there. At Atomic Junk Shop, I posted about one particularly groovy comics ad from 1971.
I also started looking for markets for some of my short fiction only to realize with Bleeding Blue now out I have almost nothing new and unpublished to submit. Perhaps that will change this year.
End result, the week was hectic, exhausting, but productive. And without the dread January sense of trying to super-achieve I get so often — my goals for this month are realistic and manageable, whether or not I achieve them.
Last month’s Genre Book Club topic was juvenile fiction which prompted me to reread Scots author Mollie Hunter’s THE KELPIE’S PEARLS. The story has an old highlands woman, living quietly in her cottage in modern Scotland (for the time it came out, which is the early 1960s), help out a kelpie. The Kelpie gives her a strand of pearls for a reward (not that she asked for one) and the two of them find common ground in that they’re both old and can both remember the highlands before cars and buses were everywhere.
Unfortunately things go wrong. A local trapper sees the pearls and becomes obsessed with robbing the kelpie (stealing from the fae is, of course, a very bad idea even in kids’ stories), the old woman draws so much attention when she visits Loch Ness (the kelpie arranged for her to see the monster) that she’s swarmed by papparazzi and her life is suddenly turned upside down. Can the kelpie see a way out?
This is a sweet, very low-key story, but it’s gently charming. I intend to (re)read more Hunter eventually.
WITCHCRAFT: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson didn’t work for me at all, despite my interest in the topic. Perhaps that’s because where most books portray the trials as driven by personal animosities at the local level, Gibson sees it more a top-down process backed by a consistent theology of demonology, and I’m not sure I buy her take (please note that she’s a historian and I’m a lay reader so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt). Also her final chapter on witchcraft today and popular perceptions is kind of a mess, dealing with Stormy Daniels (apparently she’s wiccan) and the Felon of the United States whining about how every criticism is a witch-hunt — it really felt like a bad fit for the book.
FRANKENSTEIN SLEPT HERE by Tim Kelly is a Monster Mash stage show in which Baroness Frankenstein has turned her home into a Hotel Transylvania-style refuge for monsters including schizoid Jacqueline Hyde. Uh-oh, though — a wealthy American socialite just bought the castle and is about to evict them! Can the monsters convince her they’re really just the domestic staff? Silly fluff that knows it (“You’re sitting on the Invisible Man!”); I think this would have been fun on stage. “In this place they should mark the towels his, her and its!”
ELAK OF ATLANTIS collects Henry Kuttner’s four sword and sorcery stories of the Atlantean princeling turned sell-sword after slaying his cruel father in self-defense and leaving the kingdom to his brother. Now he and his sidekicks — drunken swordsman Lycon and the druid Dalan — battle various Lovecraftian horrors (I was amused that the Norse gods here are presented as such) and would be conquerors. This isn’t up to Kuttner’s wife CL Moore’s Jirel of Joiry fantasies but they’re certainly entertaining; surprisingly the fourth story brings the series to a reasonable close rather than leaving it open-ended.
All rights to cover images remains with current holders.
Filed under Reading
As I wrote a couple of weeks back, I found a spate of Jekyll and Hyde-related films right as I was wrapping up. Which is inconvenient but better than finding them after I finish.
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (2003) was unavailable to stream last time I checked but by the vagaries of such things, it suddenly turned up on Prime. John Hannah stars in an unremarkable film following the template of the Spencer Tracy adaptation : Jekyll plans to test his experimental drug on a madman who dies, so why not test it on himself? Oops.
The more adaptations I watch, the more I’m impressed that the Fredric March version takes a half-hour before the first transformation and yet it isn’t boring; this film, like so many, is tedious. The most interesting aspect is that Sir Danvers Carew (David Warner) has Jekyll take a new maid into his household who turns out to be Carew’s illegimate daughter, the half-sister to Jekyll’s fiancee. That feels like it should lead to something … but it doesn’t. “The mind controls the body but who controls the mind?”
The Argentinian EL EXTRANO CASE DEL HOMBRE Y LA BESTIA (1951) is another one that suddenly turned up online, though unfortunately without any subtitles. This starts off like Stevenson (the story of the trampling, the will, the encounter by the laboratory door) then goes it’s own way with Jekyll’s wife’s pregnancy giving Jekyll the strength to resist the temptation to become Hyde. Only four years later, playing with his kid, the doctor notices his hands are turning hairy … From what I’ve read online this has a lot of A-list talent from Argentine cinema but I can’t say it worked for me. Though obviously I’m missing a lot.
CARMILLA HYDE (2010) is an Aussie film in which a straitlaced young woman’s friends decide to loosen her up by getting her drunk, drugged and raped (the term “friends” is doing a lot of work here …). To help deal with it her therapist gives her a split personality to handle the emotions until she can process them; before long, however, “Carmilla Hyde” is taking over and also taking revenge on her so called friends. And it turns out the therapist has some secrets of his own … Appendix material only. “My brother blames me — the evil child that destroyed the family.”
IGOR (2008) is also appendix material but I wish I’d had more time to pay attention to it. The story of a small kingdom of mad scientists has the eponymous assistant hoping his invention will elevate him above a mere lab worker, but a scheming rival plans to steal his secrets with the help of shapeshifter Jacqueline Hyde. “Everyone has an evil bone in their body but it’s up to us to decide whether to use it.”
Discovering the 1970s THE GHOST BUSTERS was available online, I watched their episode dealing with the ghosts of Jekyll and Hyde. This series dealt with three inept ghost hunters (Larry Storch, Forrest Tucker and Bob Burns in a gorilla suit) who work through endless shticks and comedy routines that bury the nominal plot (Jekyll’s scheme to free himself from having to haunt houses alongside Hyde). None of it was funny. This has nothing to do with the later films though Filmation revived it as a cartoon when the first Ghostbusters film hit big; a fight over the name is why the film spinoff cartoon was labeled The Real Ghostbusters.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Earlier this week I told myself, hey, at least I’ll have finished Jekyll and Hyde by the end of New Year’s Eve … sigh.
The manuscript went off today, thank goodness, but even so … sigh. A bigger sigh because I didn’t get anything else finished this year. And because the worn shoes I usually walk the dogs in — good, supportive sneakers, though ragged — got a disastrous amount of shit on them Wednesday after Plushie took a gooey poo in the dark. So they’re toast. Then today when I was supposed to start PT for my bursitis, the rehab place called to say my therapist was sick, can I reschedule for two weeks. I’d really hoped to start on a day I wouldn’t be putting in a full day’s work.
Getting back to writing …Southern Discomfort didn’t come out. I didn’t finish Savage Adventures. Didn’t get the next draft of Let No Man Put Asunder or Impossible Takes a Little Longer done. I have a couple of short stories that need just a little tinkering … which they didn’t get. I sold some books (thank you, all my readers! I appreciate you!) but I ended up the year with slightly less money in the bank than I started out. Not Christmas presents, just a bunch of extra, and necessary expenses at the end of the year.
Part of the problem is that writing for the Local Reporter kept eating up my time — long meetings, a bunch of interviews in one week. Theoretically that should have meant less work the following week as I got ahead. Somehow it never did. I like the work but I’ll have to manage it better in 2026.
Part of it was that working on Jekyll and Hyde took up a lot of time and, of course, more of it as I moved to the finish. I should have anticipated that — movie books are fun but they always take more time than I expect.
Plus the perennial challenge of increasing pet demands. Dealing with two cats in the morning, albeit ones I love, is somehow more than twice as distracting.
Part of it … I don’t know. I made progress on all my projects but I didn’t finish anything. That’s the perennial risk of writing, particularly when 90 percent of my deadlines are self-imposed: I can write and rewrite until the cows come home and then decide to rewrite some more. If anything, that’s a weakness that gets worse over time. As Lawrence Block said, I can see more ways a story can go than I could when I was younger. That can produce better stories; it can also lead to lots of second guessing and deciding to do it over or telling myself it could be perfect if I just rewrite … like they say, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
For 2026 I have ambitious goals on my 68 for 68 list. Not ones that should exceed my grasp. Two drafts of both novels. Finish Savage Adventures. Publish Southern Discomfort. Make more money. Submit more stuff (I’d gotten out of the habit this year). Plus, of course, enjoy my life (not a stated goal on my list but still). Despite the frustration with my writing, I had a good year in most other ways. I’d like to have another one in 2026.
To end on an up note, we took the Christmas tree down yesterday. Because it’s in the living room this year (easier than rearranging the two cat litterboxes where we normally put the tree) I realized I could take it out through the French doors (visible behind it) and across the deck and not have to deal with a trail of needles all the way through the house to the front door. It worked! Much less physical strain too. I’ll take it as a good omen.
And frustrating as missing my deadline was, when I got Jekyll and Hyde off this morning, it felt sooooo damn good. I went to celebrate at a local coffee shop … which was closed until tomorrow.
It still felt good to finish.
Happy New Year and best wishes to all y’all.
All rights to images remain with current holders. Comics cover by Jack Kirby with Ditko inking.
Nope. As I worried yesterday, I did not quite have the oomph to keep going New Year’s Eve and finish up Jekyll and Hyde. I could have pushed through but I think it’ll be better if I rest. With today a holiday, I don’t think anyone was going to get started on it right away, anyway. It’ll be in tomorrow morning.
It’s disappointing considering how I’ve knocked myself out this month to get it done. But there were things that had to be done this week and I had to do some of them. And due to people who are not us screwing up, they took a couple of hours longer than anticipated. With that extra time, I might have pulled it off.
I’m also exhausted so that’s it for now. More discussion tomorrow when the book will be done.
Just the same Happy New Year. 2025 was a frustrating year in a lot of ways and often horrifying politically but there was also lots of good stuff. May 2026 be better for all of us.
Filed under Nonfiction, Personal, Time management and goals, Writing
Sunday, I was absolutely certain I would deliver my manuscript for Jekyll and Hyde before 2026. That is, today.
Monday, however, we had a boatload of stuff that had to be done and all of it took longer than it was supposed to (not our fault, for the record). Yesterday there was a whole bunch of little follow-up stuff that had to be taken care of. So now I’m like two chapters short of where I thought I’d be and way short of where I anticipated being on Sunday evening when I forecast the end of the year.
It’s not fatal if I’m late. I can definitely get it in this week and McFarland is flexible… but damn, I was looking forward to the satisfaction of making deadline.
Wish me luck.
Filed under Nonfiction, Personal, Time management and goals, Writing
Not that I’m feeling Scrooge-ish or anything. As I said yesterday, it was a good December despite having to stint on my usual Christmas entertainment. But I was reflecting this week that Christmas season is one of the few big events in our calendar.
We don’t travel together (we don’t want to leave the dogs with someone else — at their age a health problem could happen any minute, and sometimes does). I don’t go to the Mensa national gathering regularly like I used to (it’s harder to justify spending the money without TYG there) and we haven’t gone to Dragoncon since the pandemic. There are no big regular family events for us to attend. That makes Christmas time that much more special, something to look forward to. That’s only possible because it ends, leaving us waiting (sort of) for next Christmas.
I’m happy to say goodbye for now. Only 11 months till we buy the next tree, whoo-hoo!
Christmas was low-key — us and the pets — and good. German apple pancake for breakfast, then presents, then naps, then, as always, A Christmas Story. Then a game I bought TYG for Christmas, The League of Lexicon. The naps were needed because TYG got up earlier than usual after Plushie fell off the bed. In a Christmas miracle, he didn’t wreck his leg or any other part of his body.
Gifts? From my friend Ross I got the movie Alias Nick Beale. From my bro, an Oberlin College t-shirt (he was in that area recently). From TYG McVitties digestive biscuits (mmmmm), a Cheescake Factory gift card (like League of Lexicon that’s an “us” gift) and a collection of the great German director Fritz Lang’s. Plus a book, The CIA Book Club.
Other than that, the week was spent working like a demon on finishing Jekyll and Hyde. It’s going slower than I hoped but not so slow I can’t finish it up Wednesday. Not guaranteed though, so we’ll see.
Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. Also Happy Holidays, Cool Yule, Kickin’ Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah and Fab Festivus.
Cover by Nick Cardy, all rights remain with current holder.
