All Eyes on Me

I'm enjoying thinking about and working on my idea for my Victorian ghost story audio drama. I've tagged it "Dead Tongues" as a possible title, though that's still tentative because I'm not a big pun person even though I've gotten some early appreciation for it.

I've got an idea of the sort of narrative I want in it. Without getting too specific and spoilery, I want to play around with the classic style of a plucky hero being drawn to investigate the haunting of a creepy old house and in the process discover a larger mystery that led to the haunting. I've got Mariel, my plucky hero, a young woman who despite opposition has pursued classics studies, and I've got a young couple, her sister Helen and her new husband Frederick, who move into the haunted country home they have just inherited.

What I need to figure out is what the nature of the haunting is. Why is there an angry spirit or spirits clinging to this family's ancestral home? I want it to be something about the sins of the family coming back to literally haunt them-- like, they did something to their benefit that hurt others, and the ghosts are those others who will not rest until justice is done. I feel like it's a really good use of the Victorian ghost story genre to make the family curse about how they must pay for the their English imperialist entitlement to take whatever they wanted. But how to embody that in the story?

The most obvious thing, I think, is to go with something explicitly colonialist. Like, in the case of the Winchesters of the Winchester Mystery House, your family made its fortune selling guns to kill Native Americans, and now you are followed for the rest of your life by their restless spirits unless the balance is restored. That's a pretty compelling idea. But I can't write characters of color from colonized backgrounds without research and care, so I'd have to make it a pretty serious undertaking.

I could also give it a more feminist primary focus. Make the "family curse" about patriarchy's violence toward women, some horrible thing done that the current generation benefits from now. That could also make a compelling reproach considering the Victorian setting. And as a woman myself, I am more qualified to speak from my own experience.

At any rate, I want "you benefit from the sins of your ancestors even if you did not commit them yourself" to be a major theme. I don't know if I want to go super-dark or explicit with anything. I'm not sure I want the project, or the workload, to be that heavy. I just wanted to have an enjoyable side project to work on, which I think this could be. But clearly I have more thinking to do.

If anyone has any ideas, that would be very much welcome.

I want to tell a Victorian ghost story. Wouldn't that be a fun little subject for an audio drama?

I have noodled upon a scene. First real writing I've done since finishing Fallen Women.


( Scene 1 - Alea Iacta Est )