I KNOW I said the last one was the last Recursion fan art, but @drarrymyheart commissioned me to do the quantum entanglement scene and I came out of hiding to do it because LOOK AT THEM 😭😭😭
the scariest part about being a writer? pouring your heart and soul into this one fic that has taken literal months to piece together only to have this sick feeling in your stomach like it isn’t going to be a hit. not because it isn’t good, no, it’s worthy of a pulitzer, but just because readers won’t interact.
this is my message to my readers and all the readers out there: interact with your writer’s fics. someone can leave a seven word compliment along with a reblog on one of my stories and i’ll think about it for days. writers, good writers, have stopped writing because of the lack of feedback they get. nobody should get the amount of support to the point where they feel it’s worthless to do the thing they’re doing.
I'm so excited to finally share this bind of one of my all time favorite fics! Thanks to lettered's generous binding policy, I decided to go all out.
This bind has a foiled cover and spine, hand sewn silk endbands, and thirteen custom chapter headers. It was also my first time rounding and backing.
You can find more pictures and information about my process under the cut.
For the cover and spine, I recreated the design of Beasts of the Field (1902) by William J. Long.
I wanted something that captured both the whimsy and maturity of the story, and this cover fit my vision perfectly. It also gave me the opportunity to recreate another antique cover from the public domain.
Unfortunately, the design was a bit complicated for my Cameo 4, so I was unable to fill the lines in. You can also tell that the foil did not adhere properly near the bottom, so the flowers are lighter than I would like them to be.
Because of the trouble I was having with my Cameo, I decided to foil the spine by hand. I deeply regretted this decision two hours later, and it took me four hours to finish foiling. My wrist still hurts!
Sewing the headbands was my absolute favorite part. I was encouraged to try them by a lovely binder on Instagram, and I ended up completely addicted. I splurged on some fancy silk thread so I could give this fic the royal treatment it deserves! I think they look like beautiful little caterpillars.
As for the rounding and backing... I'm not going to talk about it. Nightmare. Lots of nervous sweating. Emotional agony. Next topic!
I worked on the typeset back at the beginning of January when I had some time off, and it took me a solid week of obsessive editing to complete. My sister suggested that I use Harry and Draco's patronuses for the chapter art, but there unfortunately aren't many public domain illustrations of deer and foxes playing together.
It was at that point that I also decided that I wanted the animals to match the respective ages of Harry and Draco and the tone of each chapter. For the 13 chapters I ended up editing 25 different illustrations together. The bulk of these are taken from vintage versions of Bambi and Reynard the Fox. It's possible that a few stock images from 1980s nature books snuck in there, but I did my best to keep them all pre 1925.
I'm not a skilled editor, and some of these are worse than others, but I'm quite proud of what I was able to cobble together. On the final page I put a young fox and deer running off together. I wanted it to seem like Harry and Draco's inner children had been freed.
I'm a bit embarrassed to say that this bind took me about 4-5 months to complete! I started in early January, and went wildly off track learning how to round, back, and sew headbands. And then I was hit by some killer creative block that only lifted last week!
There are still many things I could improve on, but I'm so proud of everything that I learned and accomplished with this bind! A big thank you to lettered for inspiring me with such a wonderful story. <3
you know those tropes where you come across them and are like Hard No Thank You but then you see the author’s name and are like… 😒 i will read this FOR YOU 😒…
if there's one thing we can learn from this booping experience it's that we need to give people notes and interact with them for tumblr to be fun and thriving
E: What character do you identify with most? Is there a certain fic of yours that captures these qualities particularly well?
N: Any fic ideas brewing that you’d care to share? 😏
E: Harry in Within You Without You is made up of a fair bit of me - especially his anxiety in that fic.
N: I see what you did there Star 🤣. DRARRY JAWWWWN. For those blissfully unaware, @itsphantasmagoria and I somehow ended up in an unhinged conversation about Philly on discord, and shit-stirrer/genius @apricitydays-lazynights threw the suggestion out there for us to do a fic/art collab with drarry in Philly.
Premise is: Not long after completing Auror training Draco transfers out of the country due to harassment, ending up in Philadelphia. Ten years later, Auror Harry is sent there on TDY/assignment and they cross paths again.
There are 10,000 words of this crazy crack taken utterly seriously fic written so far and I absolutely adore it 😂 PLUS as a result I get to collab with THE phantasmagoria? DREAM.