Hello! I've been thinking about binding some danmei novels in my native language, but I don't know where to start. I found your blog recently and find it very inspiring! I was wondering if maybe you could share with me what tools and materials would be good to get started with?

Sure!!!! So, I'm on mobile and don't have links at hand, but if you go back through my bookbinding tag, there are other replies I've got about the materials for making a book specifically. The renegade publishing blog also has resource documents that walk through the bookbinding process and include links to educational materials, etc. So for here, I'll focus on the danmei side of things!

So, a fun feature about these books is that they tend to run LONG. I've seen a number of people try to take up bookbinding in google docs, and honestly, it's doing things on hard mode. For many danmei, it's basically impossible. I think my EARLIEST earliest attempt at svsss began in gdocs, and that's not a super long novel, but gdocs was choking on it. A word processor on your desktop is going to be your best bet. Personally, i invested in a microsoft office license, because it was familiar and i could afford it. But the free parallel to that will be libre office, which does basically everything word can do, with just minor differences.

On the fancy end of bookbinding software, affinity, indesign, and microsoft publisher are also names you may hear tossed around. These can do fancier, more artistic layouts, but also come with a heavier price tag. And because i had webnovels on my radar from the start, i wanted something ROBUST. I wanted to be able to dump all of the husky and his white cat shizun into a single file and work from it. And i did eventually do that! Being able to typeset a single file rather than repeat each step across several is great, especially since i tend to tweak design choices as i go.

For danmei, you're also going to want a robust printer. I have a color laser that's been an absolute beast of a machine, but a black and white laser can get you a long ways, and monochrome designs can be very elegant. You don't want an HP brand printer, their toner subscription practices are downright predatory, but Brother and Canon are names I've seen recommended highly. You probably don't want an inkjet printer, because long books take a LOT of ink. The one exception would be if you can find an affordable ink tank printer.

And the last major thing i can think of is that if your main computer is a laptop, consider typesetting with an external mouse and keyboard! Danmei novels are split into lots of short chapters, frequently split across just as many web pages, with lots of footnotes to format, and laptops are convenient but not ergonomic. Doing too much on there is just asking for a repetitive strain injury. I've done it, but often paid for my sins in pain! And your laptop keyboard may start complaining too, I'm almost certain my first typeset of mdzs was the nail in the coffin for my last laptop's keyboard, haha

I hope that helps! Best of luck to you! Ive found binding cnovels to be EXTREMELY rewarding, even though my original reason was because these things would NEVER be licensed in english 😂 I'm delighted to see people experimenting with it for other translations in other languages, I really hope it goes well for you!!!!

See. I'm essentially never going to answer one of those polls about 'would you something something whatever prev.' Because if one is popular enough to reach me it's almost guaranteed to be put on my dash by many people on a wide gradient of acquaintanceship. I'm fully aware that I'm the no fun allowed robot in this situation, but it stresses me out! It breaks polls as meaningful tools! Polls don't have to be meaningful tools to begin with but it still haunts me that it breaks them! What if i answer this from a person i havent spoken to in five years, and then a decade-long mutual puts it on my dash?? AGONIZING

(also even if i reblog to mention my answer it's on a sideblog which is funny to me to never name outright on this one, so 99% of the time it would be extra meaningless to whoever i respond to)

(also also i vaguely envy those people capable of conceptualizing what opinions their icon would hold, this is basically just me, but it's also fake, and meanwhile real me is busy answering 'lol yeah why not' to every character ive seen so far in the blesch smash or pass polls)

This is terribly petty of me! Completely unimportant! It's a silly and trivial activity which does not match my own silly and trivial urges and so i helplessly shake my fist at the sky! But i think my canvas is dry enough now for me to get back to what i was doing

so about a year ago I started binding the Annihilation script with shimmery covers - and then life happened.

with the news of Absolution and the new blue and purple cover art? I had to go back.

(inside art by Rory Kurtz)

You know what, i should make this the year of genesis final fantasy. Not in general, just for me. He's really doing a bang-up job embodying those girl rotting vibes I've been experiencing thus far

.....okay, I'm not stoked about this. Why do i suddenly have a ton of new notes on the months-old post about the repost of raksura short stories that got the patreon nuked? Reblogs have been off for months.

And while I'm here, any insights on why new followers when i haven't done anything but whine about how creatively dead in the water I've been? These aren't the definitely-spam followers who get elided on the notifications, i got an email for each of these. Or the like on my old old post about the jones trial? Any insights on why all this?

None of these LOOK like spam blogs, and i was curious enough that i went and searched raksura and/or my name on here, reddit, and twitter to see if there was anything likely to have done this. But tbh I'm on the verge of deciding this is the latest shitty iteration of spam bots, now with an extra veneer of pseudoreality and reporting everyone involved for spam and blocking from sheer irritation

(i do also have two very old neglected asks about two of my open-ended transformers series that I've been meaning to answer for forever, I've just been so tired and scattered lately, lmao)

hello! i came across your wips button and i wonder if youll ever go do them? the transformers ones sound super good!!

That.... is an excellent question and one I'm not super equipped to answer! The boring downer angle is that I've been horribly, immovably blocked on art and writing for a long while now, and it drives me nuts trying to shake that AND i rarely have any luck. I know i can write pretty darn well, and I can do it FAST, there was a hot minute where i successfully held myself to uploading at least one piece of art or writing per day. That pace was never going to last, my art got better and my fics got longer, plus i went from languishing in the falling action of grad school to having an actual job, which was both a less flexible schedule and also more money to explore other hobbies. But that period of my life really drove home how important that rhythm and periodicity is to me, and i haven't been able to recapture that in years.

As it is right now, if i manage to finish anything, it's only going to happen with either a fandom at the VERY very forefront of my mind (svsss or the raksura core au right now), or with an idea too fresh and good and crunchy to resist, independent of fandom (there's a dungeon meshi idea lightly haunting me). Transformers is a remarkably good playground, I love it SO much, but it's been years since I reread any significant part of it, so the ideas aren't flowing. I trust my old ideas, but if the canon isn't fresh, or I'm not actively talking about it, the spark is unlikely to catch. There's an off-chance of me reacting to an idea in some other fic via a medium of transformers smut, but I'm also struggling to read right now too 🥲

But! But!!!! A thing ive noticed and that drives me bananas is that when i move, the shape of my hobbies changes. I vibed really well with writing in NJ and MA, and COMPLETELY lost the ball when i relocated to VA. I cross-stitched in NJ, faded in MA, and lost it in VA. I bookbound like nuts in VA, but i just did a local move, and I'm no longer getting the reaction of 'I'm idle, I should make a book.' I don't know where things will go, first was a rush to unpack my boxes, then was a rush to learn to paint a room, and now my home is full of jumbled furniture and objects and I'm so overwhelmed that all I want to do is lie in bed and level grind in video james.

Teal deer, i can't tell what hobby is going to take center stage now, and it's driving me nuts. But it could be writing! I'm much more confident about my writing than lots of other creative endeavors. I also want to revisit canon for a lot of old fandoms. I think the wip list predates my cnovel phase, but i have two beefy svsss wips, and at least two short ones, and two aus I'd love to flesh out. I have raksura core writing. I have a tf bookbinding project that's been languishing for. 1.5 years. But if i can find my momentum, I'll be diving back into canon. And i really think 5-10k of hard weird emotional smut really is my wheelhouse. I wish so hard i could recapture that energy! This is a response much longer than it needed to be, but just imagine me as the WHY ARE YOU CLOSED meme at my own brain, and much more confused and frustrated than anyone else that I don't write anymore 🤣

And finally, the big conclusion! When I was planning to not really binderary, getting copies of these books was my big goal. And then when I did binderary after all, I, uh, ended up with two sets of two books. And let's not even talk about how late these are in the grand scheme of things, these have been in my plans for literal years, and I originally intended to get them done well before official translations started releasing (I'm doing great!!). But here they are! Thousand Autumns and Peerless! TWICE!!!!

Okay. Okay. So here's the thing. These books are long. Thousand Autumns is something like 450k, and Peerless is closer to 550k. I hate splitting cnovels. I didn't want to sand instead of trimming. I wanted to keep these books as pairs (because Peerless has my favorite danmei ship of all time, but doesn't hit as hard without the Thousand Autumns context, and EVERYTHING hits less hard without knowing that yan wushi is out there. existing.)

These goals are not terribly well aligned with the facts! The facts are that those are awfully big books to fit into a single volume, if I want to use my guillotine! This is another driving force behind my small text theme of the month. It made the typesets a goddamn nightmare, and my initial copies of the books were done on half-legal paper, which I've never done before and may never do again. I finished those, and those are... big, heavy books. Not super portable. Time to see if my eyes are good for four point georgia, and spoilers, they ARE.

Set one, the large set, I wanted to use more of my snake leather. I had this GORGEOUS purple and green and black iridescent hide that i was determined to use, and fortunately I had just enough of the perfect fabric to pair with it.

But.... meanwhile, I've been buying peacock fabrics since 2021 for the sake of Feng Xiao. I had to use at least ONE of them! Fortunately, I've hoarded enough fabric that I was able to find a nice harmonious floral fabric to cover thousand autumns, and then had a nice duo bookcloth to make spines for them both! These books are quarter-legal, and the font is genuinely SO small, but still, pleasantly readable for me, my favorite customer 😂

These books were SO MUCH work to typeset snd bind, but I'm still so excited about how both sets came out! Because of my own impatience with repeating myself like, literally two days later, i redid a number of decorative elements in the typeset as well as the binding. Different chapter headers, different dividers, totally different vibes for the endpapers! This was a big project to ask from myself in such short order, especially when I was starting to flirt with burnout, but I genuinely couldn't be happier with the results :D

So. I know I just did a binding of The Disabled Tyrant's Pet Palm Fish, but that was a lectern book, and it's been tough to get a lectern binding that I'm completely and unreservedly happy with. If more practice is what it takes, then I'm game! But in the meantime.... this is the fish book. The romancing a fish book. The impatiently waiting for a fish demon to..... devour my essence book. The 'my servant thinks I'm fucking my fish' book. The fishpreg book. The fish themed wedding book. What, was I supposed to NOT use my exciting new fish leather??

Now, the struggle with fish leather is thst it comes in very irregular oval-y shapes. I wanted the spine to have the right weight, so I cut the biggest rectangle I could wrangle from the hide, and belatedly realized my remnants weren't large enough to get good corner pieces. So that's something to consider in the future! But despite that, the fish handled like a dream, the gold and brown aligned BEAUTIFULLY with a wave fabric I had in my stash, and I shamelessly went back to the scale themed endpaper well. I usually don't like repeating myself so quickly, but I had a lot of fun designing this typeset, and this story is just a delight on every level!

Meanwhile! I was trapped in the liminal space of a remote work summit, and finally managed to power through the last few assembly steps for my beautiful daughter. Here, have an uninformative preview image with horrible office lighting, let's see how long it takes me to excavate enough of my house to take real pictures

NOW. We get into a section of binderary I like to call exciting new leathers. So what happened. Well, I read Moby Dick for book club, and frankly, there was a lot more bookbinding content in that book than i EVER would have guessed. Not that much, by volume, but any bookbinding is always a fun surprise! And one detail that SNAGGED me was the mention of a book bound in shark leather. Naturally, i immediately went on a quest to see if I could find 1) affordable and 2) ethically sourced shark leather, and never mind point two, because I struck out hard on one. So in a fit of self-pity, I bought a scattering of snake, fish, and ray leather, and then had to start thinking about how to use it.

I spent a while kind of paralyzed, but the first thing that REALLY caught my eye was this one white and gold snake hide (with purple tones here and there around the scales), and how it made me think of lyctoral robes, and that means it's time for another round of 'It's About The Bones 👌,' babey!! By the incredibly talented @sunderedstar, of course. Benefits of being friends with an incredible writer include the constant supply of gourmet food that's a pleasure to bind and practice with!

And since this fic had been one of my earliest test subjects for a k118 binding, I wanted to keep that going, and try one of my favorite fics in one of my favorite styles, testing out then new leathers in this format! And the book is a success, but the k118 thing, uh, didn't work. A fun feature of the snake leather is that its so thin I'd be afraid to even try paring it further. Which is great, that's the step I'm worst at! But now I wonder if that thinness means that paste isn't able to saturate the hide the way it would with goat, because the first time I opened this book, the spine IMMEDIATELY popped off the text block 🤣

I'm not mad at all, the book still works great, it's just got a breakaway spine now and can't do the k118 360 degree party trick. And the binding came together gorgeous! This is a typeset I'm still proud of, and I think i found the right fabric in my stash to match and contrast to the snake leather colors, and the embossed endpapers gave it a nice weight and elegance, all without losing that locked tomb flavor, but capturing a very different vibe than my prior bindings. All things told, I'm very pleased, this was so fun to work with!

Next, a pair of fanfics! I've been fighting really bad reading brain for a while now, which is SO frustrating when I have a fandom I know I love, authors I know I love, fanfic summaries that have my full attention-- and I can't get myself to start reading. So to try to sidestep that, I went ahead and bound two tossawary fics blind, Servant to a Different King, and A Child Once. It was hard not to go for some of the tossawary fics I've read and loved, but I really want to kickstart my brain into reading new things.

Both of these were a lot of fun to work with! I wanted to get blue somewhere in the binding for both books, because mobei-jun, but I didn't want to just take the lowest-hanging fruit. For Servant to a Different King, it slips in through the endpapers, and for A Child Once, it's the navy bookcloth. The bindings also weren't designed as a pair, but I still like to link things in quiet ways, so I took the endpapers from the same pack, and went with chaotic, high-energy ones, for Shang Qinghua. So I love how these came out, and I'm pleased to report that I've now read A Child Once! (not from my nice new book, that would be silly, i just suddenly unlocked my ability to read it on my phone)

Next up, another round of mistakenly saving the villain! I did make a silly error with this one. I wanted a teensy weensy misvil, and I also needed a last second sewing project to bring to a local fiber guild meeting on the morrow. So I printed my existing typeset at a smaller size, and... well, there's a reason most of my tiny font documents use georgia as a body font. This is still readable, but the newt serif (my beloved) is fighting for its life.

But other than that, I'm delighted! My other editions of this have gravitated toward very busy, very red fabrics, and I do love those energies for this novel, but I've been trying to use more of my duo stash, and it does make for a very classy case. And I used these gorgeous embossed endpapers that I've never quite gotten right before, but I nailed it for this set and another book this month! And this paper is just SO pretty, I'm so pleased that I'm doing better at managing my hinges with it

Another set! I might have tripped over my own feet with this one. What we have here are the four Doom novelizations from the nineties. I've never played doom (only chex quest), I've never read the books. However, I do have a lot of affection for the first one, based on the I Dont Even Own A Television review from back in the day. The 'I'm a born lever-puller' bit lives in my head rent free. HOWEVER, I was under the impression that these were some of those out of print books that are basically impossible to buy normally, and when collecting info for my front matter, I... learned that I may be mistaken! So I need to work on sourcing those through legit channels, but in the meantime, my maybe-unnecessary preservation efforts!

They're so cute and tiny and I love them 🥺 I was binding these blind, so I have no idea where this is going, but I caught snippets in later books about story focus on... a mormon guy wrestling with the idea of sex before marriage? I don't know if that's bad, but not what I thought I was getting into, hahaha. We'll see how this goes! I'm very pleased to have it, and delighted with how cute it turned out, and I'm stoked to have it on my shelves

Okay, I have thirty new books to post about, so let's start by knocking out half of them right away! So, recently, I went to a vintage store and bought an adorable little shelf, thinking to use it for my tiny books. And then I got home and realized that most of my tiny books had been given to their authors. So I needed a project to fill this out, and settled on the oz books as a fun public domain set that would look really nice on the new shelves! This set includes the 14 books written by baum himself, and then the 15th book written from his notes after his death.

Now. Here's my first self-inflicted stumbling block. Each of the books is a pretty small chapter book. Nice and bite-sized, right? A real easy, laid-back lift? Right???

Yeah, once you stack 15 of them, they totaled something like 675k of text. So this is where 'tiny text' became a theme of the month. My eyes are very good, and I have natural monovision that will probably keep them very good. But all my binderary books are for me this year, because I'd be reluctant to inflict most of them on anyone else, haha

I ended up wrangling that all in a single word doc so I could keep my formatting consistent, and My God. Then the resulting books were also so small that getting consistent trimming on the guillotine was a real adventure too. But I'm very happy with these! They're so cute and fun, and these were some of the favorite books of my childhood, so I'm delighted to have them now!

Okay! Binderary! I wasn't going to do it, and then, two thirds of the way through the month, I was like 'but what if i DID.' So naturally, after my attempts to avoid exhausting myself like in previous years, I once again immediately exhausted myself. But I've got everything together, I've got photos, I just have to string together words to post! So that will start publishing by tomorrow or so.

In the meantime, summary info. Binderary 2024 was more restrained in terms of scale and materials than previous years, by design. I made 30 books, for a total of about 8000 pages and just under 4 million words. Two pairs of novels account for about half that word count. My themes were: 1) tiny print that's good for MY eyes, while everyone else's are out of luck ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, 2) legal paper (and the using up thereof), and 3) interesting new leathers. So here we go! More specific posts coming soon.

i ate'nt dead

Here's a VERY mediocre midnight picture where i managed to lose the reflection on the foil i was photographing while catching it for every other book on the table, but! BUT! I haven't forgotten this all exists. All the binderary books are ready to photograph, as soon as I can scrub the green paint from my fingers, apply new polish to the nails, clean a table, and find a few minutes when I'm not running late for a meeting. This year has been.... so tired and lethargic, but simultaneously, so overstuffed and frantic. Honestly not super into it!!!!