I’m getting ready to start a new draft that will have, at its core, a mystery involving…well, we’ll just call them “ghosts” for now. I’ve been looking at Victorian/Southern US Gothic-style mansions for inspiration on what our “haunted house” will look like, and it makes me wonder what it would be like to live in a house like that. Three stories, maybe a semi-hidden sub-basement connected to the root cellar, hidden passageways behind bookcases and beside fireplaces, cold walls and drafty windows. Old electrical that flickers the lights when the wind blows just right, and gauzy curtains that really should be replaced but just haven’t been, for whatever reason.
Furniture too heavy to move from the house, closets stuffed with moth-eaten ballroom wear, beds that look fine, but have long since become mouse condos, and a beautiful old set of the finest steel knives you could ever hope to see, still hidden in a kitchen cupboard that looters somehow “missed”, still shiny and sharp as the day the owners…ah…went missing. Disappeared. Stopped upkeep on the house, in any case.
Isn’t that just the most delicious setting for a suspenseful tale? A mystery to solve, might-be-ghosts to appease/survive, and innocents to keep safe…potentially, anyway.
It’s been teasing my brain for months now, the story fleshing itself out quite literally as scenes on a tattoo sleeve for my right arm. The sleeve is nearly finished – just one more session to go. Just thinking about the story playing in my head gives me chills every time I think of our late heroine, her father and sisters, and the drama that our current heroine is about to uncover.
Are you ready, dear readers, to meet Misty and Jane? I can’t wait for them to finish telling me their respective stories…
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