Off Topic On-Topic musings - Ghosts of Whitehall

Editing is moving along at a snail's pace. My goal of having it done by August seems very far away, but I've got to remind myself that the part I'm editing right now is the oldest stuff. The closer we get to the the end the more recently I've revised it and that's going to make things go faster and easier. In the meantime I'm taking notes and reading chapters aloud to friends and family for spot-checks.


In the meantime though I've been thinking a lot about my next project/projects - Runian, the prequel to Threadcaster and Ghosts of Whitehall, a separate IP I've been wanting to write for a long time.

Whitehall is going to take a while to research and such. I still need to organize the events in my head and nail down the character list. I know the basic gist of it; it's spiritual investigation from the ghosts' pov. That's barely scratching the surface but I'll spare everyone details for now. All I know for certain at the moment is that the main character is a 100 year old 8 year-old ghost named Victoria who must find a way to communicate with the investigators in order to save them from a furious poltergheist hellbent on destroying the Whitehall legacy including all souls both living and dead.

I'm basing the house extremely loosely on the Lemp mansion. Whitehall (the house) is going to be located in the Benton Park area and Whitehall (the original owner) is a brewer with a very successful beer company. I want to name as many of the characters as I can after famous St. Louisians, specifically the present-day people, where their monikers are more obviously homages than the past where they might be confused by the actual people. Plus I've got names already for a lot of my ghost characters that I'm not willing to change - namely Victoria, her century-old companion Lancaster the butler, his wife Moira and Whitehall itself. 

There are a lot of famous people from the St. Louis area I'm discovering. Not just the givens like Mark Twain and Tennessee Williams, but obscure people like Linda Blair from the Exorcist and Lance Robertson, the human and host on Yo Gabba Gabba (a show on PBS I've watched and ironically wondered why our children aren't normal).  In reality I realize that no matter how bad I want to name someone after local comic book artists and internet celebrities, I'm going to have to pick the semi-famous ones like Lindbergh and Shaw... (obviously naming someone Anheuser-Busch is being heavy-handed)

Then another idea could be to name everyone after the streets of St.Louis. I like this... because I finally get to name someone Spoede.

And Jamieson for that matter... boy it's gonna take a lot of work to put an "I" in that.