Progress update about The Senseless Counterfeit

I finished writing Act 1 of the Senseless Counterfeit this afternoon. At the present rate, the whole play should take about 3 months. This is only guesswork on my part, as I've never written a play before. It's possible that my progress will accelerate over the latter half of the writing, as usually happens when I write a novel.

I'm away for a few days in August, at a wedding in Metz, and may also spend a few days visiting my daughter in the Middle East at some point in July. Apart from these commitments, there's really not much to prevent me focusing on the Senseless Counterfeit.

The Senseless Counterfeit - a Neo-Jacobean Tragedy

At the instigation of Gill Kirk, I've temporarily set aside Odour Issues in order to write my first ever play. The Senseless Counterfeit is a Neo-Jacobean Revenge Tragedy, written for the most part in pentametrical blank verse, with a contemporary Bristolian subject-matter, and featuring all the standard tropes of the genre - murder begetting murder, plays-within-plays, grief-maddened daughters, disguises, poison, cruelty, and ghosts.

Briefly, the story draws on certain events in Bristol's recent history, relating the lynching of an innocent and cultured man accused of paedophilia, this episode generating the torture-murder of a second man, this time genuinely a paedophile. The denouement centres around a tantric weekend organised by the sophistical villain of the piece, who gets his comeuppance courtesy of an LSD-tipped dildo encountered through a glory hole.