Muse, Thy Name is Fickle - Or Lucid Pantings Experiment Dos

One can want to write something, but if it doesn't want to be written, it shall not be writ.  At least, that is what I learned with Burned.  But while my muse cut acquaintance with first attempt, she has recently been flirting with an old love, what I called my Vrance universe.  Basically my faux-Regency world with vampires for the ton.  What brought this about?  Georgette Heyer.


The seed was sown when I followed a link from Writer's Cafe to a blog series that unexpectedly mentioned her name.  (That's the power of words for you.)
 
The seed sprouted into the desire to read a book of hers.  Since I had read most of her Regencies, I decided to try a Georgian one that had caught my eye before.  In particular, this one: Faro's Daughter.  Which I am about halfway through.  I would have been done and on to the next one, if not for the writing bug which bit because of her world and whit and writing. 

Aiding and abetting, or nurturing and watering, my GH fiction love was a new book. Discovering and Defeating the Ahab Spirit.  It is about passive, assertive, and aggressive personalities, and I discovered I wanted to write about a passive character who tries to take on responsibilities that aren't his because he blames himself for things that aren't his fault, such as his illegitimate birth. 

And so I did some weeding, and I began to piece together some past Vrance ideas (ghost seer with putative daddy problems, manipulative mommy who experimented on her child, doormat with a magical backbrace, and guy who is lost in a card game to a vampire), and I combined them, pantsingly.  And I came up, after much manure hauling, this premise:

 

As an illegitimate child, Mr. Avan "Twixt" Mannering has always been a problem--for his mother, for his putative fathers, for the families involved, especially if the scandal were ever revealed.  Over the years, he tried to make up for this by taking on responsibility for everyone else's problems, especially those of his mother.  But this time, in his twenty-first year, he takes on one problem too many.

Upon the deaths of her husband and lover, Mrs. Mannering abandons her family for the mission that took their lives: toppling the vampire regime.  In doing so, she leaves both families in a lurch, with no choice but to cover up the deaths until Twixt can bring his mother home.  But Twixt's concern go beyond the scandal the families seek to hide; he needs her to fix magical experiments gone wrong, experiments she had conducted on her sons in the name of creating a solution to the vampire problem, experiments that had left the eldest crippled and Twixt vulnerable to ghosts' depredations.  And when she fled, she took her stop-gap cures with her.

But to track down his mother, Twixt needs the help of ghosts he should be laying to rest.  For Mrs. Mannering is heading for Sanctum, the land she believes is the source of the vampire's invulnerability and immortality.  It lies on the other side of the Forest of the Unblessed Dead, a place no living mortal has ever returned from.  If he has a shot at saving both of their lives, he has to turn his weaknesses into strengths, but more than that, he has to find the strength within to confront his mother with her own sins.

Now this does not quite touch all of it.  There is much more to it, but for now, it is a working premise, which focuses on the main goal and issue of the MC and at least a few of his problems.  But for now, at least, it surely does make a pretty bloom for November.