Why itch?

One or two have asked me: why put Kin-Bright, an epic poem, on itch.io? It's a good and fair question.

There're what you might call push factors. In my other life, I've some in-the-guts knowledge of (very) traditional publishing: one academic book on the shelf and one in press with a publisher that predates the Roanoke Colony. And I also know people I file in my mind as 'proper poets', the ones who bring out collections, edit magazines, win grants. Those I bother with are nice people, and they do good work! But their world isn't my world, not really. I didn't think print suited CWKB. The energy in print poetry does not at present lie in long narrative verse that thumps and that lets you spit the alliteration. I might not even be a very good poet, outside certain very boutique parameters. The plot and content of Kin-Bright are meat for sf/f and YA publishers, but I imagine they would shy away from verse, with its limited audience and inefficient use of page space.

I don't think online publishing platforms such as wattpad fit very well either. From my cursory knowledge, they don't let you play much with type and layout, which I need to do. They're very locked in on the model of present-day novelistic fiction, in prose. Kin-Bright is, I hope, sillier and stranger than that, and I figured it might sit more happily among other strange things even if those strange things happen to be games.

That thought brings us to pull factors. Itch hosts a lot of anime-inflected space opera material anyway, though admittedly more often as games. The first audience I seek isn't necessarily people who already read verse, it's people who understand that sometimes, wow! cool robot. Beyond that, well, in the second half of 2022 I found myself growing fond of all the passionate oddities one finds here. No platform is perfect, but itch seems to me to have a culture of free, weird things, and I would feel very happy if people filed CWKB as a free, weird thing (provided they read it)! 

(And for those awaiting progress: I have books VI and VII roughly drafted! Some material remains to be written, and then redrafting, checking &c will claim my time. But I hope to have another chunk of the story ready for you within the next month or two months.)