Business, quite serious business.

It is quite feasible (it is, don't try and change my mind) that someone will approch the previous entry and internally, or even externally as the mood strikes them, comment that it is 'interesting...'

I am a fan of interesting. Interesting is intriguing. As are synonyms.

But the point of this post is to enlighten, first about the musical, then a little about myself.

"Grave Business" began life as a favour to a friend. It was high school, it was Scotland, he was in need. Of a creative writing idea. So Ceidiog, Heather and I sat around a cafe table and devised a Victoriana Drama. It began as his short story, but I liked the idea so much I expanded and polished it until it announced a short story was not enough.
"A novella then!" I cried in desperation.
"Not even."
So it grew into a novel outline.
A novel outline long enough for a play.
"Be more ambitious, darling." It urged me.
So we arrive at musical.

In a short outline, "Grave Business" is a little bit madcap. In a slightly more helpful summary; "Grave Business" is set in a alternate Victorian London where a 'cure' for ageing has been discovered and as a minor side effect, people are no longer dying of old age. Our story follows Asher, a gravedigger, his irreverent mortitian sister Patience, and her newlywed husbund, Jack Ketch, of glam rock hangman origin. Asher has a terminally ill son, Levi. He wishes to purchase a dose of 'cure' to effectively 'freeze' his son so medical advancements can be made. Oh Asher, shame they haven't invented the NHS yet... Instead, they made a simple but underestimating law in which any doctor caught providing 'cure' to a youth below the age of eighteen may be given a sentence up to that of hanging.

Asher is haunted by the memory of his wife who died in childbirth. He takes the seemingly logical path and starts directing more business towards the family trade, via murder of course. The guilt eventually drives him to confess to his sister, who commits suicide because of the knowledge (a laundanum overdose, she dies in Jack's arms). Asher is caught out and sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. Jack is a hangman, I thought this just. Asher's son cannot be saved, even today the probibility would be low.

As I cannot write music I am resorting to drawing it instead. This accompanied scene 1:

This is the very height of my artistic talent. I hope I'm better with words. Note the square one in the back? It says "I Told You I Was Ill" and is a Spike Milligan reference.

A little more about me?

I was born in New Zealand, and today I had a substitute whom I suspect of being Dolores Umbridge.