It's CWKB’s first anniversary!

A twelvemonth timeline | has tumbled since
Key-rider crowned | found cruel ending
on the lance bereft | of loving foe.
Work was wearing. | But reward for grind
is reader’s grin, | ratings glistening,
stream-hall listening | and striking asks,
luck’s line-queries. | Love fuels penwork;
fate could not furnish | finer audience,
a folk greater. | So gratitude grows.

Today, 9 November 2025, marks a full year since the last parts of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright released!

I’m very grateful for the generous words various people’ve had to say about the poem. A project like this one will only ever interest a particular audience--as a friend put it early on, ‘twelve sickos’--but the people who have read it have said either nothing or nice things. If you’re one of them, whether you read just one book or all eighteen, thank you very much.

In the year since, I wrote and published a shorter poem, Spearhand Faring, which stands on its own narratively but takes place in the same setting centuries before CWKB. The lovely mecha-focused podcast On the Shoulders of Giants did a very entertaining episode on CWKB (they even interviewed me!), and CWKB also featured on Crunchyroll News. 

Though fully available for free, CWKB has earned more money than most poems do (a low bar, and the pound-to-line ratio looks less flattering). I can say with confidence that I have thousands of readers, even if the number of thousands is not a large number. Much better poets working before print would envy the speed and reach that technology’s given me.

I know for a fact that some readers found me through Szkin’s eye-catching art piece for the cover. I think they did an excellent job! You can see more of their art in several places, but for this audience I might point out in particular that they contributed some mechanical design work to the rather fun recent game Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog.

And let me mention again Catia RX’s Gordian Cycle, a project that might interest you if you enjoyed CWKB. It marries the grandeur and the unhinged violence of early Irish legend to the grandeur and unhinged violence of tokusatsu.

So, what’s next? Right now, I’m chipping away in little bits at what I hope might be a small project building up my familiarity with Twine. It’s slow going and perhaps what I’m learning is that I don’t cope well with the format! I’m also hoping to gather up all the odd little poems I scribbled out on the side while writing CWKB and SF, and then release them in some kind of cheap, er, e-chapbook. Whether either of these things will come to fruition… well, Fortune laughs at mortal plans. Wish me luck!

Top image: activities tied to each of the year's months; work of work of Pietro de’ Crescenzi, later fifteenth century, London, British Library, Additional MS 19720, folio 305r. Made available without copyright restrictions on use here.