Future plans

After Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright, what next?

Will there be more?

Certainly I’m mulling some ideas that would have loose narrative ties to CWKB. I’ve contemplated, for instance, a Twine project: an interactive poem set among the Spear-Folk, a generation or two before the fall of Tar, earlier in the career of the Earl of Hawks. I'd like to do that, one day.

More immediately, I'm writing a shorter adventure story, in verse, set in what the Taru seem to consider their heroic period: the early settlement era that we saw depicted on the shield of the Eye of Day in Book XI of CWKB. It should run along simpler and more cheerful lines. It will be gay; giant robots will battle each other; all the dialogue is in alliterative verse. I hope to get that out in 2025.

On the other hand, I don’t expect to write material about exactly the characters in CWKB, or any kind of sequel.

(While talking about 'more', let me give another quick plug to The Gordian Cycle, another work with parallel interests. Catia RX is doing great experiments with dryly funny prose in the style of the Ulster Cycle, and I've heartily enjoyed every instalment so far.)

Will there be an audiobook?

I’d very much like to offer a clean, clear audiobook version of the poem. Recording and editing one would consume a throng of labour-hours, so I’m not tackling this straightaway.

As a stop-gap, the recordings of the live readings covering all the poem’s books are available on Twitch; you can find links to them in this devlog post. A reader has generously compiled these recordings into a set of files with rough-and-ready editing that you can put onto an MP3 player, and you can find those here on Itch. With luck and time I'll be able to offer something more than this.

What about physical publication?

It’d be good to put CWKB on the shelf. To my surprise, I’m not the only person who thinks so: several readers have said things along the same lines.

Options lie open here, on a spectrum from hand-building a book with something like The Electric Book, to seeking an agent. Somewhere between those two stands crowd-funding, either self-managed—through something like Kickstarter—or in partnership—through something like Unbound.

All of these have their downsides. Making my own files for print-on-demand would mean a lot of own work—computer work, at a desk, which tends to worsen the damage in my arms and hands—and work in a format hostile to verse layout, to boot. Any kind of traditional publishing route might well founder on the fact that SFF publishers and agents don’t believe in difficulty, and poetry publishers don’t believe in fun (or at least, so I imagine).

So I'm thinking about physical publication, but I'm thinking about it slowly and carefully!