Writing FAQ

Miscellaneous questions I've had from various quarters about Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright! Some of these I've answered before on streams or in individual tweets; gathering them up seemed worthwhile.

Will we find out what the armours look like?

In some respects. But I'm cautious about saying too much: I would rather the audience construct the armours as their imaginations lead them.

How old is Kin-Bright?

I don't know—I have a horror of lore—but I imagine her as in her mid- or late-twenties. Qwerthart is a few years older.

Are the gods and the chthonics real?

Some of them have a tangible, empirically-detectable influence on reality: the Taru god killed a lot of people at the fall of Tar, after all. Whether they are real in exactly the terms that the narrator, the Taru, and the Skelonders think, I do not know.

Do you have this planned out?

Some key facets of the ending and the beginning came to me as soon as the idea crystallised; if anything, they were its crystallisation. The opening lines do, after all, lay out what is going to happen.

At a larger scale than the individual books, the story comes in big broad chunks, and I think I know what each chunk will do, overall. The first three chunks are books I, II and III, and IV and V. I'm writing the fourth chunk now. I foresee two more chunks after that.

So I have a landing-pad whenever I'm writing. I have to come up with a lot of the details and the routing between where I am and where I'm headed, though!

There's a funny story I can tell about the crystallisation of the story in my head, but it would dox me. So that'll have to wait on me moving, if I ever move.

How long did you think about CWKB before you started writing?

In detail, with specific practical plans: for a few weeks.

But I found a tweet from 2013-me about wanting a mecha Aeneid, so, also: for a decade or more.

How do you write?

I can offer two answers to this!

1. Every evening I set a timer and sit down in an armchair, away from the internet. While the timer's running, I compose poetry. I write it out using a fountain pen that a student gave me as a graduation gift, in a claret-coloured ink that I like because it's close to black ink but just camp enough to unsettle people. When the timer rings, I go to my living-room desk and type the results up, editing them as I go. When a book is finished, I spend a few days reading it aloud and ironing it out.
2. Actually, that's more of an ideal. My life is as chaotic as anyone else's. I write on the bus to work and over lunch and in noisy medical waiting rooms. I think about similes when I'm walking to the shops. Some nights I'm exhausted and I don't really get anything done. I'm never writing; I am a failure. I am still writing; I'm writing now.