1,000 downloads! and a recommendation

Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright has now passed 1,000 downloads!

This is a small readership, and the number must be taken with the caveats that (1) some of those downloads will be people re-downloading the poem as it grows, and (2) not all of those downloads represent people reading much (or any!) of the poem.

Even so, it forms a bigger audience than I ever expected.

It's also a bigger audience than a poet might easily achieve over a two-year span for most of human history. Chaucer and Sappho lived almost two millennia apart, in wildly different cultural contexts, but one thing true of both is that to find an audience they had to meet people in person and read to them, or rely on hand copying, with all its costs in labour time and materials.

I'm nothing like as good a poet as Sappho or Chaucer, but I do have the great advantage of push-button distribution to every internet user in the world, and I'm very glad about that. I'd also note that this's a bigger audience than is achieved by the smaller 'real' poetry magazines, which forever run the risk of having more contributors than readers.

So if you've been among those 1,000 downloads, however much or little of the poem you've read, I'm very grateful: thank you!

And now, a recommendation: a friend has just released what is, I hope, the first part of The Gordian Cycle, a sf work inspired by the Ulster Cycle of medieval Irish legends and by Kamen Rider. Formally, it's somewhat different to CWKB, as its model is the stripped-down, lapidary writing of its Irish models, but its methods run along similar lines: finding routes to fun, striking writing by joining pop culture and premodern forms and techniques, and engaging with the very different mindsets of the past and of the imagined future. I very much enjoyed the first instalment, and perhaps you will too.