So cool! 🤩

Playing around with covers for Praximeter's masterpiece The Night War, since I'm itching to make a spoof mass-market-paperback copy for myself.

Feel free to use and edit these. Fonts are as follows:

Image 1 (design inspired by an edition of Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick): Tan Headline, Metropolis, and Gotham Condensed

Image 2 (design inspired by The Nazi Doctors by Robert J Lipton) : IM Fell and IM Fell English SC

Image 3 (design blatantly ripped off of Penguin's Classics series): DM Sans and Cormorant Garamond. And the painting is Goya's Fire at Night

Image 4 (original design, no conscious inspirations): Paalalabas Wide, New Standard

[Posted to AO3 for posterity here]

Hi! I really loved your fic "despite the threatening sky and shuddering earth (they remained)". I was wondering if I could translate it to Spanish on my Wattpad account. It's my first translated story so I'm really excited 🥺

Blanket permission for derivative works, go for it so long as you give credit! Thanks and good luck!

Wow, this is amazing! 🤩

The Night War by @praximeter

My first bookbinding project is complete…I perfect-bound Praximeter’s Night War into a 4x6 paperback, 444 pages/111 sheets, and it came out wonderfully. Took a couple days of nonconsecutive work and it’s truly lovely to have.

If anyone would like to know how to do something like this, please let me know, I’d be happy to share my process, graphics, and/or the tutorials I used.

Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Whatever happens tomorrow you must promise me one thing. That you will stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man.

✮Happy Birthday Cap!✮  (July 4th, 1918)

Hi!! I saw the recent influx of fic love on your page and it reminded me that I always wanted to message you; just to let you know that I read 'despite the threatening sky and shuddering earth (they remained)' a good while ago and absolutely LOVED it. but i especially wanted to tell you that i still think about the line 'i know his body better than i know my own' to this very day. and that it shook me to my core, like, more than I can ever acutely express. so, thank you.

Hey there! Thanks so much! That’s one of my favorite lines, too, and it showed up on the very first page of the outline that I started scribbling once I posted snippets of that plot bunny on my tumblr all those many moons ago. Glad it connected, and thanks for dropping in to say hi! :) 

My favorite kind of exercise. 

Upon reread I noticed in TNW Ch 19's Jan 24 entry Eisenhower said, “it is with the help of men like you, Captain Rogers, that we will shape the century”. Pierce of course echoes this to Bucky. In your meta is Pierce purposefully adopting this phrase (though im not sure how he would have a recording of Eisenhower saying this that day) or is it a common saying "you will shape the century"? Thanks!

Heh heh heh. You’re the first person to ask this great, great question. 1) “shape the century” is NOT a common saying to the best of my knowledge. 2) No, Pierce wouldn’t have had an audio recording of Eisenhower saying this, but of course, he did have a written recording of him saying it: The Night War. And in that entry, Buck is ludicrously proud of Steve (“If only his ma could see her boy now.”) so it stands to reason that it might be something that sticks with him on an emotional level, even if he’s long forgotten the context… ;)

Hi Prax, I just read this sobering article on D-Day (www*theatlantic*com/international/archive/2019/06/visiting-omaha-beach-d-day-75-anniversary/590788/) TNW is honestly the first fanfic that prompted me to voluntarily do a ton of reading and research so I could better understand a fic's background. I'm in awe of how much it captures the sheer scale of human suffering during that period. it's truly made me appreciate the significance of D-Day commemoration and the veterans who show up. (1/2)

Hey anon! Thanks so much! I love the history (obviously) so any time someone shares with me that TNW made them love the history too, that’s really special. One of the drivers for writing TNW in the first place is that there was so little fic that actually dealt with the war on a scale or tenor that rang true. Often, it feels like most period-set fic basically is a romp in the woods or hanging around London in between the action, which is fertile ground for storytelling but often misses the war as a character in and of itself. It’s not something just ‘going on,’ it’s everything going on. So, really psyched TNW helped WWII capture your imagination!

In answer to your questions – 1) access to the front lines, access to military leadership, was not simply a given for war correspondents, and there was a certain degree of what was considered acceptable to write about in the context of morale on the home front, etc. In short, freedom of the press largely went out the window by threat of loss of credentials (if a journalist writes negative pieces) or by censorship (often the editorial staff of whichever news org. is sponsoring the correspondent). There was a massive push to be positive, keep up morale, the Allies are always on the move, our boys are full of confidence and good spirits, etc., and as a woman war correspondent, Gellhorn’s place + credentials would have been even more precarious. So purely from an optics point of view, writing a story with an interview with the U.S.’s most famous soldier aside from Captain America, Ike, and McArthur, where the soldier in question goes off on the reality of things, probably would not have been published, or if it had, would have been massively controversial and no doubt caused Barnes a lot of grief. So, that’s my reasoning for Gellhorn keeping the quotes in her back pocket until many, many years went by. 

2) Very possibly. ;)

Upon reread I noticed in TNW Ch 19's Jan 24 entry Eisenhower said, “it is with the help of men like you, Captain Rogers, that we will shape the century”. Pierce of course echoes this to Bucky. In your meta is Pierce purposefully adopting this phrase (though im not sure how he would have a recording of Eisenhower saying this that day) or is it a common saying "you will shape the century"? Thanks!

Heh heh heh. You’re the first person to ask this great, great question. 1) “shape the century” is NOT a common saying to the best of my knowledge. 2) No, Pierce wouldn’t have had an audio recording of Eisenhower saying this, but of course, he did have a written recording of him saying it: The Night War. And in that entry, Buck is ludicrously proud of Steve (“If only his ma could see her boy now.”) so it stands to reason that it might be something that sticks with him on an emotional level, even if he’s long forgotten the context... ;)

I just found TNW and I AM OBSESSED. I see mentions of sequels, are they online somewhere???

Not yet!  Still in development :) My life has been pretty crazy busy in recent months but not to worry, the TNW ‘verse is still very much in my mind and I still plan to publish the sequels!  Thank you for reaching out -- delighted you enjoyed it :)

Late to the party, but finally started reading The Night War last night. I’m up to Oct ‘44 and good god. It might be the most original, best researched, most astonishing fic I’ve ever read in any fandom. And I read a metric fuckton of fic. The effort that must have gone into writing this! I would pay money for The Night War. I would buy it as an actual book (as it is I’ve downloaded it to my kindle). It’s a master class in both fanfic and historical fic. I can’t stop reading. Wow. Just wow.

Wow, thank you so much!!! TNW fic is my baby so I will happily and totally unrepentantly receive any and all ‘late to the party’ comments readers are willing to send my way. :D I hope you enjoyed the rest of the fic from Nov ‘44 on -- in my opinion the back third of the fic is by far the strongest :) Thank you again!!!

hello!!! so first of all, i read the night war in one night last night and was astounded. im a history major and WW2 is my absolute favorite period of history, and i’ve been searching and searching for a story like yours. the whole time I was reading it I was in disbelief-it is amazing. i have a question though! why did you choose to have the commandos land at omaha and not utah? utah was easier to land bc of geography and tides- was there a reason you chose omaha, or was it just random? thx! 💕

Hey, thank you so much! Always amazing to hear from fellow WW2 nerds that I did okay! :) 

Funny enough, I originally had the Commandos landing at Utah for the reasons you mentioned. My thinking was that SHAEF would choose the perceived ‘safer’ landing site for their Big Old Propaganda Boys. But for story reasons, I really wanted Buck to have his clock cleaned by the madness that was D-Day, and so the chaos at Omaha seemed to be a better fit. I did put the fellas in on the second wave of assault, though, because a) I didn’t want to take away from the actual first wave of soldiers storming the beach and b) it made sense that they might hold Captain America somewhat in reserve/try to ensure his best chances of a safe/non-fatal landing. What a great question! Thanks for reaching out -- so delighted you enjoyed the fic!  

Oh my god, how AWESOME. 😭

Covers for The Night War: 60th Anniversary Edition by @praximeter

In 1947, Master Sergeant James B. Barnes’s surviving field journals were posthumously published as the classic war memoir The Night War. Now a high school history classroom mainstay and required reading at West Point, this highly anticipated 60th Anniversary Edition presents the original, unedited text alongside detailed historical notes that provide important context to the extraordinary wartime heroics of Captain America and the Howling Commandos.

Barnes, James B. The Night War: The Wartime Memoirs of a Howling Commando. Ed. Harold Miller. 60th Anniversary ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.

Link to my fic rec on @epicstuckyficrecs

I miss seeing all your Night War meta and teasers! Hope you are doing ok and things are going well!

Thanks anon! Things are good -- just in the midst of a very, very busy IRL. I do intend to wander back in with more TNW, though! As soon as I can find the time. :)

Have you seen endgame?

I finally did! I went about a week where I hadn’t seen Endgame OR the two most recent episodes of GoT, so the Internet was a precarious place. Overall — I’m satisfied with it. I’ve considered everything post-CA:TWS an elaborate AU anyway, but overall there were a lot of delightful, character-driven moments in Endgame that made me happy.