Ryk E. Spoor
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All-Patron Reward: Things I MIGHT Write 1
🕑 Added 2020-06-07 17:54:39 +0000 UTCBack in the early days of this Patreon, I did a series of posts on "Things I Won't Write", discussing story ideas that I thought were kinda cool when I came up with them, but for one reason or another I had come to accept simply wouldn't ever be written and published -- at least not in recognizable form.
In this little sequence of posts, I'm going to discuss things for which I have a general idea, but for which there are also some challenges that make it uncertain as to whether I will, or should, write the story in question. In this post, the story is:
The Vampire Who Loved The Sun
That's not necessarily the title of the book -- or the series -- but the concept that drives it. The main character, tentatively named Junryo Tatsumaki, is a foundling girl (sole survivor of a shipwreck) who is taken in by a Japanese monk who finds her on the shore (at this point I envision the monk as being a member of an offshoot of the Shugendo). This is of course a setting in which there are indeed supernatural dangers and the monk's sect is one of those whose adherents travel around and deal with such threats by negotiation when possible, by combat when not. Junryo is in her early teens when she and her master are ambushed by someone (not sure at this point whether it could be during the period when such sects themselves were being leaned on, or if it's going to be a more sinister group); in any case, Junryo barely survives because her master throws her over the threshold of a temple that even their attackers will not approach -- a temple that had been their destination, the residence of someone that her master wished to consult.
The being inside is a monster... yet not. She is a vampire, of a type not native to Japan, who recognizes that Junryo is also from far across the sea. Junryo's injuries leave the vampire no choice but to convert the young monk. Eventually, after learning about the particular abilities -- and the terrible curse -- of her vampirism, Junryo finds herself a third time orphaned when a strike force comes to destroy the temple and its owner; once more, her newfound parent-figure uses their last strength to save their young protege.
Junryo then sets out to unravel the mystery of her heritage... and to find a way that she can once more walk in the sun again. Despite the disasters, she has been raised to see the light and good in everything... and refuses to believe she cannot show that light to others.
And every week, on Sunday morning, she stays up and watches the Sun rise... and retires to nurse her burns, nourished by the glory of the Sun and the fire in her spirit.
----
There are a couple major challenges I have to decide how to approach before I could write this one. First, the early sections of the story I would have to do a fair amount of research on so I wouldn't just be stealing from Shogun and various anime; I'd want to do proper justice to the period and setting of ancient Japan, even while depicting a fantastic rather than mundane version. That would take quite a bit of time to do right. It's not like just looking up, say, specs on various space drives to make sure you don't misuse your physics.
The second major issue is that for the long term plot, the ultimate outcome hinges on certain elements that are very similar to those seen in the White Wolf setting The World of Darkness (of Vampire: The Masquerade and related games). The original concept came to me while playing in a Vampire campaign and some of the ultimate resolution elements depend on pieces of the world-design that are fairly strongly tied to the WoD setting. I don't think they're entirely INSEPARABLE from that setting -- the setting itself derived its structure from a number of predecessors -- but I'd have to build a world similar enough to it to allow the same basic resolution while being different enough that I'm not infringing. That, too, is nontrivial work.
But I do really have a fondness for the vampire who loves the sun.
