Issue 4: David Steffen
“My son bears my curse, but he bears it differently. Perhaps because he is too young for reason, his change follows the daily rhythm of the sun.”
~ Jekyll’s Baby by David Steffen
Your short story “Jekyll’s Baby” extrapolates from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 tale Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, imagining a new future of fatherhood for Dr Jekyll. Can you tell us more about your inspiration behind the piece?
I found that the story brought me back to a particular part of my life, sleep-deprived and trying to care for an infant, and how in the worst of those nights it felt like the sun would never rise and I would never sleep again. In retrospect I find myself look back on that extreme sleep deprivation and realising that in the dark of night I felt like a different person, and how scary that realisation can be. Perhaps the premise of the original story might not be as implausible as most people think. I feel like a lot of parenting-related fiction tends to consider only the happy parts of parenting, and the unhappy parts are often lacquered with humor to make them more palatable, but one of the things that makes horror great in my opinion is that we can take on the darkness without that lacquer. Of course then I had to adapt the idea to fit the story of Jekyll and Hyde but the feeling of seemingly endless nights is rooted in experience. (Thankfully the nights did end, and I have since slept.)
You capture the voice and style of the original novella so wonderfully. What is the secret to capturing a strong narrative voice in a story?
I wrote this story immediately after reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the first time, though of course I have seen many adaptations and parodies of the story. As with Frankenstein I found that the adaptations and parodies paled in comparison to the original, and how the adaptations overlook the nuance of the original. I find it a challenging and interesting writing exercise to try to mimic the writing style of a famous author to put my own spin on their story. It helps to write the story immediately after reading the original, so the details of the voice are fresh in my head. Much of it is the tone (optimistic vs pessimistic, is humor dry or more boisterous) and the vocabulary (how many words does it take to describe something, how long are the words, what sorts of things tend to dominate the description). I have written one other piece attempting to mimic the voice of a famous historical author: "Marley and Cratchit", a secret history of A Christmas Carol. Likewise I wrote that one immediately after reading the original, and I found Dickens's narrative voice to be quite interesting in that the narrator of A Christmas Carol is rather chatty and intrusive compared to the norm for a 3rd person story, and it was fun to play with that dynamic. (I also wrote that while imagining the voice of podcast voice actor Ian Stuart, and then Ian Stuart was the voice actor chosen when it was published in Cast of Wonders and I was over the moon with excitement).
You are also the editor of Diabolical Plots, an online magazine publishing original fiction and supporting emerging authors. Can you tell us about your work here and how this project has influenced your own fiction writing?
Diabolical Plots has been publishing original fiction since 2015. The last couple of years have marked major milestones for us in terms of awards with our first Nebula Award nomination and win, Hugo nomination, among others. Not that awards are everything, of course, but I never would have anticipated such an honor, as well as its sister site The Submission Grinder getting its first award nomination and win at the Ignyte Awards. Besides that wonderful unexpected news, we are generally trying to be our most weird authentic selves and helping getting our weird stories out in the world. We love to publish stories from debut authors and help give a boost to the start of their writing career. As for influence on my own writing? That's a good question. It's a little hard to answer because I have been writing less in recent years--maybe in part from impostor syndrome at seeing how much I like stories I find in our submission queue. When I do write lately I have been sitting down and writing it all in one go in a bit of a fever, so when I do get the motivation I seem to know exactly where I'm going with it, which is not the way I used to write.
What is currently at the top of your reading list?
I am reading through Marvel back-comics for much of my reading right now, currently trying to read the Miles Morales Spider-Man comics as thoroughly as possible (which since he's a newish character isn't as daunting as some of the originals made back in the 60s). I'm also working on the Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart, and I'm looking forward to getting my Kickstarter backer copy of Gamemaster Classified which is a nonfiction book (unusual for me) about behind-the-scenes in the early days of Nintendo.
David Steffen is a writer, editor, publisher, and software developer, responsible for the Diabolical Plots zine (publisher of Hugo Award nominated and Nebula Award winning fiction) , The Ignyte Award winning The Submission Grinder web app to help writers find publishers for their work, and The Long List Anthology to collect more stories from the longer Hugo Award nomination list. He loves to cross-stitch, play video games, and adopt rescue dogs.