Every Page a Painting - Click, Clack, Neigh

I know, I know, it's quite bold of me to publish this on Valentine's Day of all days, but here it is all the same.

If you don't like the timing, just come back tomorrow. I'll wait.

If you're still here and you don't care about when you'd get this, all I can say is buckle up.

(Disclaimer: everything you see here is work in progress and subject to change.)

Introduction

If you've spent any amount of time in the fandom, especially in the fanfic scene, you'll know just how common it is to cross over to another franchise, in particular one that could not be any more of an opposite to the idyllic pastels of My Little Pony. Kkat's Fallout: Equestria is a story that needs no introduction, considering it's spawned an entire subgenre in its own right, has its own Wikipedia article, and even a court case defending its right to exist in print.

But what about Kkat's other work? Not Prey, before you ask---Ministry of Image had beaten me to the punch. No, I mean Kkat's other other work.

Origin Story presents a not-exactly-canon-but-it-can-be-if-you-want perspective in the Fallout: Equestria continuum. Written as a reaction to S4E04 "Daring Don't" (or so the RCL interview mentions), it's meant to be an unfinished novel written by A.K. Yearling, about supposedly how she came to be. Actually, it's three stories in one, each nested inside one another like layers of an onion:

1. The inner layer is set during Daring Do's college years, specifically during her first expedition into the Zebra Lands. This is the unfinished novel.
2. The middle layer is set during the Pony-Zebra War: it shows Daring Do infiltrating the Zebra Lands to recover an artifact before the zebras can do the same. It's presented as a series of military reports, encrypted using fragments of the novel as one-time pads.
3. The outer layer, though it's hard to tell, is set sometime after Fallout: Equestria. These consist of just a foreword and a single annotation made by one Telia Goldenclaw.

As I've said, both Prey and Fallout: Equestria have already been printed. Might as well get this one done too, right?

(Before you ask: no, I did not ask Kkat before I started. I just went ahead and did it.)

So Here's the Plan

A slight spoiler for Fallout: Equestria: this isn't the first time Kkat's explored metafiction. The so-called "Book of Littlepip" mentioned at the end is in fact the story Fallout: Equestria itself. Why not do that again here?

Obviously, not every story in a post-Wasteland Equestria can be afforded the same respect as the Book of Littlepip. That story can be afforded all the good materials and craftsmanship; everypony else will have to make do with the leftovers. That was ultimately my goal: to make a book that you could realistically pluck off a bookshelf in a New Canterlot Republic library. This is meant to reflect the onion-layered nature of Origin Story, by building off and extending the (admittedly weak) NCR layer.

The physical stuff was hit-and-miss for a while. The only slam-dunk here was going with an octavo (6×9 in.) trim size, mostly so it can interface nicely with other books from Absolutely Everything. (Their books use half-letter (5.5×8.5 in.) pages, but the hard covers add ¼ in. to all sides.)

I also knew it'd have to be softcover,¹ but the binding methodology was where it got tricky. My first instinct, at the cost of print-on-demand (POD) compatibility, was to bind the pages and covers together with staples on one side, reïnforced with duct tape, both for character and increased rigidity. I had the cover designed around that strip of duct tape---and, in fact, it's still designed this way.

¹Yes, I know hardcovers are higher quality, but that would be missing the point of this project.

But then I remembered that Wonderglue is a thing in Fallout.

I mean, to be fair, it was mentioned only five times in Fallout: Equestria and twice in Origin Story---minor detail, really.

Joking aside, once I decided to make the book "canon" by binding the cover and pages with Wonderglue, suddenly POD was back on the table. How grand!

Already this book sucks, but then, it's supposed to suck.

A Peek Behind the Iron Curtain

Binding materials? Check! Trim size? Check! Interior design? Let's get into that.

It's not just good materials that are reserved for the Book of Littlepip---they also have much higher priority with printing equipment. In order to keep costs down, the New Canterlot Republic would need something cheaper, especially if they need only a handful of copies. Something simpler, something that doesn't need much maintenance.

Oh wait, that's a typewriter.

Typewritten books are something of a rarity in the United States, even if most manuscripts were written with typewriters, but elsewhere in the world they were the vogue. Most of these are found in the former Soviet Union, where they were used for distributing seditious and otherwise banned content.

It wasn't easy to pull this off. Every single typewriter manufactured in the Soviet Union had a type sample on file with the NKVD (later the KGB), so if a seditious text was ever discovered, they could easily trace it back to the typewriter that produced it and arrest its owner. You also needed a license to own and use a typewriter, and you had to surrender used ink ribbons to the police. It was basically a primitive form of the NSA.

"The 'Erika' takes four copies,
That is all!
. . . But that is enough."

---Aleksandr Galič

However, as thorough as their efforts were, it did have a key loophole: it didn't do the same with foreign typewriters. The state's assumption was that citizens would buy only domestic models, perceiving them to be superior, but when word spread through whispered word of mouth that they were being monitored, they started looking to the rest of the Eastern Bloc. A particularly popular model was the Erika: manufactured for domestic East German use, a significant number were bought up by Soviet tourists to take back home, unregistered and untraceable. After re-keying them in Russian, they were ready to produce all the illicit texts they could want.

These resulting texts, dubbed samizdat (a Russian loanword that literally just means "self-published"), were circulated inside covers meant for other books, typewritten on whatever cheap, low-quality paper they had lying around, and kerned and leaded as tightly as possible to make the most of these scare resources. Text frequently faded out as ink ribbons ran dry. The right margin was a flat-out suggestion. Usually, however, they were single-sided, to minimize the risk of text disappearing into the gutter.

The first page of a samizdat copy of an essay by Albert Camus. As rough as it looks, this is actually high quality by samizdat standards. Source

(Some samizdat texts were distributed on photographic film instead of typewritten paper, though this was similarly controlled. You had to be careful not to "lose" too many film rolls.)

Not all samizdats were illegal. Some people used typewriters to reproduce books authorized by the Soviet government, simply because properly-printed copies were in such short supply.

A project like this is definitely in a gray legal area (though it's more to do with copyright than sedition), but you can think of it as being in the same spirit: producing and distributing banned texts to spite the powers that be.

Let's Get to Work

Preliminary work before typesetting is a three-step process:

• Pick a trim size and decide on the margins and cover material.
• Decide on the typeface(s).
• Come up with the actual layout of the pages, including chapter headers, table of contents, copyright information, and so forth.

You can do this in any order you want, but make damn sure you nail it all down before proceeding; otherwise you'll just make extra work for yourself. We've already picked a trim size (octavo) and cover; now what about the rest?

The margins will be half-inch the whole way around. Yes, even the gutter; a story this short would not occupy very many pages, so we can get away with such uniformity. (If nothing else, it'll just be another element of its amateurish design.) It does mean deviating from Soviet samizdat; while they routinely ignore the right margin, printing on POD means we'd risk having characters being trimmed off if we follow it too closely. Although this is where we're going to break our first rule: normally you want body text to be even on both sides, but typewriters have always made ragged-right text, so that's where I'm taking this.

The typeface. . . oh boy. This demands a lecture in its own right.

Pitching the Typeface

Like I said the other week, Courier is the undisputed king of typewriter fonts---often imitated but never replicated, despite being a public domain design. Every computer in the world has this installed and ready to go---hell, it's often the font used in server terminals! That made Courier Prime the obvious first and last choice for this project.

"Wait wait wait," you're about to say, "what's wrong with Courier New?" Courier's a great typeface, but Courier New was a very amateurish digitization by Monotype of all foundries from 1992: they scanned each glyph straight off of an IBM Selectric typeball without accounting for the additional weight from when it strikes the ribbon. Really, its sole advantage is its unusually extensive Unicode support, but last I checked, Origin Story isn't written in Armenian.

Enter Courier Prime: it's Courier, but thiccer. The idea behind it is that it's a drop-in replacement for screenwriters,² to balance out the abundance of white space in a screenplay---which makes it ideal for a book as well.

²Screenwriting has its own (very strict!) formatting style, part of which requires a monospace font; Courier is the industry standard.

So that's our typeface selected. Notice the lack of plural here: samizdat texts had to make do with just what the typewriter provides. (Not even handwriting was used, since police can identify authors that way.) I'm going to do the same here. That does, however, mean I need to use one size, one pitch, one leading, one everything for every part of the book: 1p0 size and leading. That means the typeface is twelve PostScript points large, with no additional leading between lines. Six lines of this take up one vertical inch of print space---which gives me forty-eight lines inside the margins.

Monospace fonts, by their nature, are unique in that you can also specify the number of characters in a horizontal inch---this measurement is known as its pitch. Typewriters were built in a variety of pitches, but the two most common were pica and elite. Pica typewriters typed ten characters in a horizontal inch; elite typewriters, twelve. Selectric typewriters could switch between pica and elite, but since the filmmaking industry requires pica, that's how Courier Prime is optimized. This means, in our usecase, we can fit up to fifty characters on one line within the margins. (And if you're curious, that's a maximum of 2,400 characters on a page!)

As for indent size, RBDash47 says not to add more than the current point size. For example, for 1p0 body type, you shouldn't add more than 1p0 of indent. (Probably. He's not particularly clear on whether he counts the leading.) That's another rule we're going to break: typewriters have some very deep indents, due to their mechanical nature. Typically it's half a horizontal inch of space---I decided to roll with it; it's certainly clear enough.

Another advantage Courier Prime has over New is that it has actual italics, both regular and bold, something I've opted to keep for this book. Another deviation from Soviet samizdat, but I like to imagine the Ministry of Arcane Sciences had invented their analogue of the Selectric: simply swap out the typeball and keep on typing, except Twilight surely would've figured out a way to load up four typeballs and mechanically switch between them (*cough* Intertype *cough*).

And Now, Layout

Already this project is a trying exercise in minimalism, but I wanted to play around with my self-imposed limitations---use them to my advantage, make them essential to the book's design. This is the art of typesetting right here.

As I've said, most samizdat books are typed on just one side of the paper, mostly due to how cheap it is---if both sides were typed, it'd be impossible to read either side. We don't have that limitation with POD; in fact, they automatically print duplex without you asking.

But I decided to play around with this anyway.

The margins were part of that---usually you'd add a little bit of space to the gutter (often ⅛ or ¼ in.), but I kept them symmetrical. I also forwent the head and sacrificed 2p0 of space to create a foot, in which I centered the page number between two dashes. (How did I manage to do that for pages 1-9? I'll get to that.) This simple layout works for both simplex and duplex printing, with almost nothing to clutter up the page.

I took great pains to convert the punctuation to something more appropriate to the aesthetic and medium (curly quotes to straight, spaced-out ellipses, double spacing after sentences and colons, &c.), plus I fixed a few stray typos. Doing the former at one point required me to retypeset it completely from scratch. (It's a long story; please don't ask.)

Headers are simply set in Courier Prime Bold (not all caps, as would be usual with typewriting convention); I then skip two lines, then start the body text. There's an additional "subheader" to signal the start of the corresponding one-time pad, formatted slightly differently.

The NCR layer is set in all italics (not underlined, as would be usual with typewriting convention), with additional half-inch margins on the left and right. It's tight, but these passages are so few and so short it makes no real difference.

The title page just has the title DARING DO: ORIGIN STORY---justified as far right as it'll go (left over from when it was meant to be bound in staples and duct tape). No author, no imprint, nothing else.

In the end, the interior file stretches across 79 pages, including the front matter. This is optimized for sixteen-page signatures (despite POD companies using four-page sigs); it's one page short of even working to let Ingram and Amazon insert their colophon.

Half-Assed Typing

Now here's where things get interesting. Typewriters are supposed to keep a strict measure of text both horizontally and vertically, and with older models that's true. However, later typewriters have introduced something called half-spacing, which is exactly what it sounds like: it advances the carriage only half a space, such that it makes the following character, if any, overlap with the previous. There are two ways of doing this:

1. A typewriter could have a specific "half-backspace" key. Press it to send the carriage back one half-space; the next character that gets typed then advances only half a space.
2. Pressing the spacebar could advance the carriage only half a space; releasing it advanced it the other half. While it's down, press any other key to type and advance a full space.

Obviously, it's one or the other, not both. And the reasons for doing this are quite varied, for instance:

• Em-dashes are normally typed with two dashes (--), but with half-spacing, you can insert a third dash to close up the gap.
• If you know you can only fit an even number of glyphs across one line, you can use half-spacing to center one as needed.
• If you make an error, specifically by forgetting a letter, you can backspace and squeeze in the missing letter in that half-space.
• Some letters (i.e. Æ, Œ) are made by half-spacing an E atop the side of an A or O.

I'm taking advantage of the first two items here. Besides half-spacing some em-dashes, I've also centered all the scene breaks and the first nine page numbers.

Covering It All Up

Soviet samizdat books are often bound inside covers meant for other books, to throw off KGB inspectors---especially when they came knocking at three in the morning. Obviously we're not doing that: besides the length, it's also too confusing. Not to mention expensive. Instead, as we've mentioned, we're binding this as a paperback---Wonderglue on the spine, wrap in paper with the cover printed on, trim off the sides, done.

The cover, exported at 72 DPI.

As you can see, it's just as spartan as the interior: blank back, blank spine, and only the title DARING DO: ORIGIN STORY to decorate the front, set identically to the title page. That's it. That's all your getting. It gets the job done and that's all it needs to do.

Notice the text is colored red and not black---one of the few extravagances I took, and the one splash of color to the otherwise monochromatic whole.

Some typewriters have bicolor ink ribbons, with the top and bottom halves different colors. A switch on the typewriter shifts the ribbon up or down to select a color. Typical colors are black and red, meant for accounting, but I've seen an Etsy shop offering a much wider variety.

At one point I tried getting the red ink to fade out as if aged horribly, but I couldn't find a suitable shade, so I just decided to leave it as a bright bold red and let Nature take its course in the real world.

Galley Proofs

Galley proofs are signatures of a book, printed but not folded or trimmed, meant for a final review and go/no-go for printing. Usually you'll find editors marking their comments in the margins for whatever the typesetters need to know---mostly last-minute changes, but occasionally printers do their own markups for technical purposes. Sometimes authors add their own markups, but that's a luxury afforded only to whom the publisher considers the quote-unquote "best."

As you might expect (or maybe you hadn't!), this is the part of the writeup where I show you pages from the print. Not every page will be shown, of course; these are just some samples to demonstrate my talking points. (They are, however, shown in the order they appear.)

Unlike the cover, these have been exported straight from InDesign at 300 DPI, giving you that oh-so-close look at the work I've done. It's one thing to read about it; it's another to see it with your own eyes.

Anyway, have a look!

Title page, in the most literal sense of the term. It's a page. It's got a title. That's all.

Obviously it's by Kkat, but in the interest of keeping the illusion of being made in post-Wastelands Equestria, I've omitted that fact.

Copyright information. This is the most WIP page of the book at this point, and the only "non-canon" part. The text appearing here was modeled on that used in Absolutely Everything’s tomes. This is where you do learn it's by Kkat, and right at the bottom, where and when it was first published. That bit is the one thing I insist on putting in all my typeset fanfictions, even over the author's protests.

The foreword by Telia Goldenclaw. Even with the doubled margins, it's so short it still doesn't occupy a full page. It's also stripped down formatting-wise compared to Fimfiction, like the rest of the book, intentionally according to the rules of typewritten samizdat.

(You might also notice the glaringly obvious error I fixed.)

The table of contents. It's also the only part of the book that doesn't use 1p0 leading---instead, the 2p0 leading both lets the lines breathe and guides the reader's eyes to the corresponding page numbers.

The first page of the story proper. Notice the half-spacing used for the page number, the em-dash, and scene break. Notice also how the two distinct layers of the story have slightly different headers.

If you compare this to the Fimfiction version, you can also tell I cut out the "Pad Begins/Ends" cruft.

The scene breaks were the hardest detail to nail down: for a long time I wanted to do different styles for different layers of the story. Ultimately I abandoned that idea for a one-size-fits-all solution---which, now that I think about it, makes more sense.

I chose # since that's the industry standard for scene breaks in manuscripts; Daring Do would've used that in writing all her novels.

Chapter 8 is unique in two ways. First, it starts with the annotation from Telia Goldenclaw---the character's only other appearance. Second, it has two characters speaking, not just one.

Jua's dialog in the original is colored dark brown; since I wanted to keep a perfect black-and-white interior, I changed it to italics.

Special Thanks

• zemming: the brains behind Absolutely Everything, his work on Fallout: Equestria inspired me to undertake this project singlehandedly. He also gave me some feedback on the aesthetics over Discord.
• Admiral Biscuit: this guy's a lot more old-school than me. He often uses a typewriter for speedwriting competitions at ponycons (now that takes guts!). Needless to say, his advice on typewriting conventions helped shape the look of the story; I really can't thank him enough.
• Alkarasu: as one of my Russian contacts, he's familiar with Soviet samizdat material, and was kind enough to show me some examples to sample from and provide insight as to their quality and production. Спасибо, друг!
• Kkat: last, but absolutely not least. This book literally wouldn't exist were it not for Kkat writing it (and Fallout: Equestria!) in the first place. Thank you for your work, and I'm so sorry you had to find out this way.

---

And that's all she sang, folks. This wasn't nearly as long as my last blogpost, which is good for me (and probably good for you too!); it lets me focus more on specific topics in just one book, rather than encompassing an entire field.

As always, if you have any feedback, be it questions about the process, suggestions about Origin Story, or you just want to leave some hatemail, you know what to do.

Good night, and good luck.

Comments

[Chicago Ted]

Don't think this is a one-and-done deal, either. I'll be starting on another one tomorrow. It'll be something more near and dear to my heart, and I have not just the blessing, but also some contributions, from the author in question. I love how this next one turned out; I bet you will too.

Stay tuned for that!

[Themaskedferret]

Ooh this is fascinating stuff! From the Samizdat and typewriter explanations to the book itself.

It looks very cool indeed. (Still curious about the evil typo though)

And looking forward to what you make next n_n

[Chicago Ted]

5768069

Ooh this is fascinating stuff! From the Samizdat and typewriter explanations to the book itself.

Thanks! I didn't think I'd end up talking that much about the origin of samizdat, but here we are that much better for it.

Still curious about the evil typo though

If you mean with the foreword, it's the title itself. Very obvious homophone mixup.