Starting at the start

This is the second in a short run of postmortem devlogs following the release of CWKB. I offer these in case they're useful!

Although the idea for Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright crystallised when I thought up the ending, in my writing process I started at the start and wrote my way through to the end.

That's not quite true at the level of the passage or the line: while writing, I did sometimes find myself working up sections that I knew would have to fit into future books. But I wrote Book I first, and I wrote the whole story in a series of chunks, like this:

1. Book I
2. Books II and III
3. Books IV and V
4. Books VI–VIII
5. Books IX and X
6. Books XI–XIII
7. Books XIV and XV
8. Books XVI–XVIII

I slightly regret doing it this way.

I knew the least about what I was doing when I wrote Book I. That first book required multiple rounds of remedial work over the last couple of years, stripping out moments of free indirect discourse—we don't want any of that dangerous novelistic stuff around here!—fixing incompetent metre, and otherwise improving the poetry. The book still has more lines that don't satisfy me than any other, and it also still has the highest number of suspiciously novelesque moments.

When in the final months of writing I read through the whole poem from nose to tail several times, I noticed how much more assured and effective some of the verse in later books feels. (I'm not saying it's outright good poetry. But it is better, in my view.) How sad it is, then, that readers meet Book I first!

But could I have avoided this? I'm not sure. I suspect I needed to tackle this particular project in order just to get it done at all.

And perhaps linear writing brought advantages too. This approach meant I could release the first five-ninths of the poem in a series of small chunks, with their own live-streamed premieres. That release style probably drummed up interest; I know it kept me interested and charged with positive feedback.

I'm not sure, therefore, that I regret the linear path I took. But if I was doing the project again, I might think harder about it!

You can find the previous postmortem entry here.