Spearhand Faring release date, stream plans

Spearhand Faring will be released in full on Saturday 13 September, priced at $5.99, for which you will receive:

• the full poem in both PDF and EPUB formats
• a brief set of notes (included in the PDF and EPUB)
• a brief glossary (included in the PDF and EPUB)
• an audiobook copy (two MP3 files, containing the first and second halves of the poem)

The audiobook is not professional work, but I think it’s at least listenable, and I hope it’ll widen access to the poem.

I will also read the poem live on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/thaliarchus), in two parts:

• the first half on Saturday 6 September at 1800 GMT/UTC/Zulu
• the second half on Saturday 13 September at 1800 GMT/UTC/Zulu

These live readings will be available as VODs for a few days in each case, but will not be available for the long term.

Spearhand Faring is an adventure story, like a medieval romance. It loosely reworks one tale from Malory's Morte Darthur into a form inflected by mecha anime.

The poem has ties to Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright (which is wholly free to read!): it is set some centuries earlier, and internal evidence suggests composition before the events described in CWKB. It stands on its own, however, and readers should feel welcome to read it on its own if they wish.

Spearhand Faring runs to about 1750 lines, and so is considerably more compact than CWKB; on the other hand, Spearhand Faring is in some ways more intricately worked, since all the dialogue--more than a third of the poem's length--uses alliterative verse.

Image: the poet presents his work to the king, from a copy of John Lydgate’s Troy Book. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 232, f. 1 recto. Image provided by the Bodleian Libraries under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and available online here.