And on the day before the North American Total Eclipse, a hardcover was born · 5:44pm April 7th
...I've been struggling to find words for most of the day.
I knew about this or rather, I knew that it was in progress. It's a project by Truthaura, and they're the one who took that picture. (If you have any questions about the creation process, please post them to the comments and they'll be seen.) Truthaura set the real eclipse as a self-imposed deadline, and everything was unveiled in the 'verse chat server late last night, after I'd already gone to bed. I didn't see it until this morning. And I'll likely be holding it within two weeks. Truthaura is currently traveling to see the true eclipse, so postage is going to understandably wait for a while.
(I will not be going anywhere. I don't have that kind of budget, I would have had to leave yesterday, my closest viewing point is Buffalo, and the forecast for that area is mostly cloudy. But I'll be peering into the shadows tomorrow, just like much of the continent.)
But it's going to be mailed to me at the dropbox. (The address is pinned in the #p-o-unboxing channel for the chat server, along with the Amazon wishlist link.) And a few days ago, I paid to renew the dropbox. Rental cost for a full year. Six months of that was a previous Ko-Fi goal, and the rest came from my juggling budget until my shoulders tried to break themselves. Renewal of the dropbox is usually a Ko-Fi thing and with the Ponicon drive under way, I can't have any other goals unless there's a crisis or I hit the point of surrender. So it was renew for a year now, or face the possibility of losing the address at the end of October.
The dropbox is not cheap. Shortly after paying the renewal cost, I openly asked the chat server for a sending of postcards. Just to feel like I hadn't paid out all of that money for nothing.
The above picture... sort of justifies everything.
And then some.
I knew this was in progress. But I didn't let myself think about it too much, in part because my own attempt to format anything had been such a drastic failure. The concept of holding a book... was a dream I was afraid to have. So I put it on the back burner and tried not to glance at the low flame.
I've been thinking about the effort involved here. The formatting, printing, binding, foil application to the covers. Hours. So many hours. I've been told it was about twenty hours of labor.
Wondering... what I did to deserve any of this.
I've thanked Truthaura as best I could in the chat server, while openly saying that I'd reached the worst place for a writer: the ones where words didn't work. And I talked a little about the Blue Sky fandom. That's a Portal fanfic: one of the best-known, and a story for which art began to emerge during the publication process. I've always been a little envious of that group, and some of that came from knowing the author had inspired visions. Ones which had made it into the world.
Maybe today is when I started to understand a little more of how that writer felt when the first captures of imagination began to come in. Because I've had art appear from the 'verse, here and there. Plushies of felt and wire. There's a needlepoint piece. To a degree, I've inspired people, seen (and received) the results, and -- I'm grateful, while knowing that too is too weak a word.
I'll always be grateful, and always struggle to express it.
But this is a book.
Art, drawn, painted, or digital, can take hours to create, days and weeks. Same for plushies and sewn pieces. They're all equally legitimate expressions of caring and inspiration. I appreciate them all equally. I do.
It's just that... this is a deeper level of dream. An older one.
To touch a physical incarnation of something I wrote. To hold it. To turn a page...
...yes, I'm crying. Just a little.
I'll have to make sure to have plastic around when I open this. I don't want to get it wet or do any other damage. Replacement copies would be hard to secure.
The print run's a little on the low side.
(Mandatory end-of-blog Ko-Fi link spam for the Ponicon/Tokyo drive. Which will continue, without mercy, until goal is reached, morale improves through reaching the goal, or Total Failure. Place your wagers now! Or consider tipping towards the goal. The tip may be more practical.)
That's honestly beautiful.
Hello everyone,
It's me.
I'm so happy to be able to make this for Estee. I've said it before, but to have it said here as well: if I had only made this for myself I would have felt so guilty. It wouldn't be right for the only print copy of a story to not be in the hands of the one who wrote it.
Her writings have been a close companion of mine since I was a young brony in high school. That I can pay back that deep importance gives me all the satisfaction I need. You don't read over three million words of an author you don't find deeply important.
Also this was way more fun than the empty journals I've been working on up until this point 😁
Are there more copies? Please say that there are
Congratulations Estee. I have enjoyed your writing for quite a while, (Did I really start at the beginning of Triptych?) so I can only imagine how much this means to you. Maybe you can share a photo of you holding it with your face cropped out? Either way congratulations again and thank you so much for sharing your world with us.
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Unfortunately as it's a hobby project, the print count is two. One for Estee, and one for myself. I can't imagine the legal concern and grey area of trying to do it for any kind of payment.
It would be far more trouble than I'm willing to risk at least.
5775722
Aw pity, I for one would love to add this pretty looking book to my bookshelf. But it's your project so I'll respect that.
That thing is *hand* bound form the looks of it.... Wow
Hand made is hand made.
If you go to any publishing company, even Self Print, there is a minimum order of 6 needed?
One for the US Library of Congress Archive, and one for The British Library Archive, as well as a couple mandatory others.
Something something We Demand Copies To Hold In Secure Spaces For The Future Of Humanity.
Ther is a video on YouTube about the nitrogen purged industrial warehouse that is The British Library Archive. It uses robot pick and place to access the contents.
I wonder if there is a copy of a print run of Stories In Stone in there?
Congrats!
It’s truly a moment of reflection when words you have slaved over for hours appear in physical form.
So, again, congratulations!
That's so fantastic! I'm so happy for you and truthaura! That looks like a lot of love and time went into making it. Absolutely gorgeous with the colors in the lines and the fade into white or gray near the top. Beautiful stuff.
5775722
Thank you so much for making this dream come true for Estee. It warms my heart to see some genuine joy and happiness in their words for once. No but it is a beautiful thing to be able to give back to someone who has had an impact on your life in such a meaningful way. ❤
That's a pretty one!
That's wonderful. Wow.
That's amazing!!
Beautiful, amazing, spectacular. And... deserved. You receive great appreciation like this, because you make great things.
5775712
How did you learn how to hand-bind things? How did you print the pages? Did you just... use a normal printer?
5775928
A warning is needed for the incoming infodump, I love talking about this stuff.
(tl;dr: yeah I just print everything on an epson ecotank, the only snag is you need to source niche short-grain paper to have the pages feel right for a book of this size when using a off-the-shelf printer)
I've mostly slowly picked up a number of skills across the paper-craft and fiber-crafts, of which book binding is essentially just in the overlap on the venn diagram. There's a lot of good resources you can find online though. Most of what I've used to get guidance has come from some of the guides linked on r/bookbinding. In particular for this project I was (loosely) following off the structure provided by this guide: http://www.davethedesigner.net/booktut/index.html
For typesetting and printing: The form factor of this book was mostly dictated by the fact that I needed to use a regular off-the-shelf printer, which really limits the maximum input paper size and prevents a lot of the fancier printing tricks. I fiddled around in LaTeX for a few days, half as an excuse to finally learn the darn thing, and set it up so that I could just feed a lightly de-bb-code-ified version of the text directly into it and have it spit out a layout that only needed some light doctoring to really shine.
(One incredibly specific detail I paid special attention to ensure was laid out exactly as I desired is that in chapter 6, I have a right-hand page end on
(Totality)
Come back to me.
Then, you have the beat as you turn the page, and read
It was amazing.
I am very proud of this.)
In terms of actual paper used: While I was really picky about the choice of paper, it wasn't out of pure snobbery. There is a quality that all paper has called "grain", that often doesn't matter at all in a day-to-day environment, but it matters a LOT for books. Paper bends easier with the grain than against it, and you want that bending direction to be aligned with the spine to make flipping pages easier. This means that the paper stock needs the grain going across the short direction (as you fold each sheet in half to make text blocks), and any standard printer paper has long-grain, since its expected to be held vertically. (So much time on this project was just, searching for places that would *sell* niche materials like this. They aren't even expensive! just hard to find!!) I ended up sourcing some Mohawk (brand name) Superfine(product name) that was being resold in the right dimensions with the right grain.
I have tried to condense this into as manageable and readable an info dump as I could. However I think I have failed. I do not apologize.
5775939
Don't you dare apologize for this! I requested the info dump and find the topic interesting, though I don't know much about it!
Oooh, this is awesome! Congratulations, Estee; and well done, truthaura!
You were and are a decent human being, albeint one with an absolutely rotten luck, and an extraordinary ponyfic author. You deserve more good things in your life, and this is definitely one.
5775939
Do you have any particularly neat LaTeX tricks you'd be willing to share?
I also have a system for making LaTeX out of FiMFic text (on GitHub: https://github.com/creideiki/fimfic2pdf ) and am always looking for ways to improve its output.
5776080
I would kinda expect that the specifics that I'm using wont be the most applicable to your project, since a lot of the work for me went into matching the physical constraints for printing that I had.
I ended up using the memoir document class for setting everything, and doctored up the .txt download format with some plain manual find-replace. (swapping -- for em dash, fixing em and it tags, etc.) a paste of the .sty file as it was for the final print. https://pst.innomi.net/paste/ber5vgx3k5ueqb9o3b6sjstq
The goal of the styling decisions I made were to emulate the default font theming and layout options that fimfic has. AKA: Open Sans and justified text. There might have been more natural options, but it just felt right.
Then it was just a matter of doing some minor massaging and keeping an eye on the warning/error log in TexStudio to find the places the layout engine got confused with. By the power of microtype I was actually able to get the final document to compile with no oversized or undersized box warnings. microtype was so helpful, I only wish that pdftex supported fontspec so that I could both get the easy font control I want along with the entire toolkit microtype has. I'm sure theres probably some way to do it but I'm too much of a latex novice to figure that out.
5776140
Thanks! Even if it's not immediately useable, it's always nice to get inspiration from how others solve the same problems I have. If nothing else, it might make me take another look at memoir - that class has always looked very complicated and highly configurable when I've read about it, so it's nice to see an example of how little configuration is actually required.
So far, I've gotten the best-looking results using the "novel" class, but it is very particular in what kinds of formatting it deems acceptable.
Estee, you ridiculous person.
Even if it weren't for anything else, you wrote the story.
truthaura, thank you; for both the book and the infodump.