Those of you with long memories may just be able to recall that last December, at the time of the release of our EPIC issue, we also kick-started a little something called POST-EPIC, which isn’t a genre – yet.

POST-EPIC was a collaborative exercise, where we posted one line from each of the poems in EPIC, and then invited readers to contribute further lines via the comments feature. We also laid down a challenge for our readers: get to 1,000 lines, or else. All right, so I’m making up the “or else” bit.

Eight months later, how did we fare? Did we actually reach our elusive and completely arbitrary target? Or did we in fact chalk up a Post-Epic FAIL?

A total of 880 comments have now been left on all POST-EPIC posts, which is pretty unbelievable, but then we did give people a long time to participate in the dialogue. But 880 still leaves us well short of 1,000, doesn’t it? That’s why we need to add 34 to that total, to count for each of the 34 opening lines in the issue. Okay, so that’s 914. Still nowhere near 1,000.

Except for the fact that in our initial challenge we set a target of 1,000 lines, not comments! Yes, and we humans being creatures who tend not to follow the rules, a significant number of comments were composed of not one line but two, three, four and sometimes five lines! So if you count them all up, and add them to our total, you can see just how we reached our target, without even trying!

To celebrate this rather ephemeral victory, we’ve now updated the poems in POST-EPIC to include all of the lines submitted by our readers in the main body of the text. Now, for the first time, you will be able to judge whether the Cordite hive-mind is actually capable of making sense, or whether the whole thing was just a horrible waste of time.

And what better way to start our analysis than with Bev Braune’s opening poem, So the story goes: Glámis, the Bride!

We trust you will enjoy this post-POST-EPIC intervention of ours, and welcome your comments – one line at a time, of course!