A quick edit of a completed, but early, draft of a short novel set in a place and future sufficiently distant to resemble the Dickensian past. Morbid, and fundamentalist intensifications of Enlightenment values and the suppression of faiths and fictions. A melodrama, with storms and young love and predatory villains. Templated to some degree on Italo Calvino's libretto for Luciano Berio's "opera" Un Re In Ascolto and taking up the theme of epistemic angst - of knowing that one is denied the information one needs to understand what is going on. Underpinned, also, by the stations of the cross.
Now for a rewrite, which I hope will be a moderately light one, and then the first beta read (or is that alpha read - I get confused about that stuff. Anyway, eyeballs on it).