hooksbooks

[hooksbooks]

I love Granny Weatherwax so very much, and one of my favorite about her is just that she’s kind of really unpleasant all the time; she’s nosy and critical and stubborn as a mule and a filthy hypocrite and she’s prideful and far too serious and extremely bossy and refuses to admit when she’s wrong, she’s deeply conservative and judgmental and demanding and rude to everyone, no matter who they are. But that never stops her from helping, or wanting to help, she’s going to help and she’s going to insist on helping and she’s going to complain about it every second it takes. Esme Weatherwax is not nice, or polite, but she is good, and I love her so dearly for that

[hooksbooks]

You guys do know you're supposed to reblog things, right

[hooksbooks]

This is the first of two books I bound for @renegadeguild's Tiny Books Bang 2025. The story is The Fifty-First Dragon by Heywood Braun (which is in the public domain) and was typeset by @tinwhiskerpress. It's a cute little story about Gawaine le Coeur-Hardy, a reluctant student at a knight school who, much to his surprise, is trained to slay dragons.

This tiny bind is nearly square, about 2.5" per side. The real highlight of this bind is the bookcloth, which I wove myself from satin ribbons. And it was a mighty pain, let me tell you! I've been wanting to try out a triaxial ribbon-weave as bookcloth for a while, but it's a bit busy for a full-size book. I thought it would work perfectly for this fic, and I specifically chose colors to invoke dragon scales.

I started by measuring out how much I would need to cover two tiny books and drawing it out on a sheet of paper. Then I pinned the brown ribbons in parallel lines through the paper to my carpet. Then I wove the light green ribbons through the brown ribbons, in a one-over-two-under pattern at a 60° angle, with each new ribbon's pattern offset to the right by one brown ribbon.

Then I tried to figure out how the green ribbons would fit in, and I looked at tutorials, and I looked some more, and I looked at some videos, and I tried weaving and it didn't work, and I left it for a couple of days, and I looked at some written tutorials, and eventually I figured out that at the angle I picked, I actually needed to put the light green ribbons in with each new ribbon's pattern being offset to the left by one brown ribbon. Because the ribbons were already all pre-trimmed at the edges I couldn't scooch all the light green ribbons to 120° instead of 60° (which would have been the easiest solution if I had plenty of extra ribbon on each side, which I didn't), so I pulled out every third ribbon, pushed down the other two, and re-wove it in in the new position. Very difficult to describe in words, but in effect it reversed the order of the offsets of each new ribbon so everything would work nicely.

Once that was done, it was much easier to figure out how the dark green ribbons needed to be woven in to complete the pattern! I probably spent...between ten and fifteen hours? hunched over this weaving pinned to my carpet. In hindsight, I definitely should have pinned it to something I could have moved up to my worktable so I didn't have to be hunched over like a floor gremlin the whole time.

Also I ran out of dark green ribbon, so my copy has one corner that's only brown and light green. Glad I made two copies at the same time!

Once I had the bookcloth woven, I ironed fusible interfacing and tissue paper to the back side and cut them out. The ribbons didn't stick super great at the edges and there was quite a bit of finagling going on and gluing down individual ribbons at the turn-in edges. Additionally, because the bookcloth was 3x thick, I had to add another 1mm piece of board to each cover (which I had made from two 1mm boards glued together, knowing I'd need to add another layer) to fill in the gap between turn-ins so the endpapers didn't dip down in the middle. The result wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good and I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

All-in-all, I'm pretty satisfied with this binding. It would have been nice if it was easier to differentiate the front from the back, but it's a cut little bind and I'm proud of it.

[hooksbooks]

Fanbinding: How to Woo the Winter Soldier by @writeonclara

My other bind for @renegadeguild 's Tiny Books Bang: This fic is riotously funny, and I'm thrilled that I got to bind @hooksbooks 's typeset.

This style where the text is sideways is called a dwarsligger. Octavo is a perfect size for this. It fits so well in the hand and is easy to flip through. I had some scrap marbled lokta, which I used for the covers. Black for Bucky's mostly monochrome aesthetic, with that signature pop of red.

My first spattered edges came out satisfyingly well. Thanks to Renegade for facilitating a great event, I had so much fun! Maybe next year I'll branch out from octavos and do some smaller sizes!

And writeonclara, let me know if you ever decide you'd like your own copy as a gift!

[hooksbooks]

(opening the author’s works page after finishing a fic) and if im lucky they’ll have written this exact same fic but different a bunch more times

[hooksbooks]

my fav genre of fanfic is "ship i have not ever considered but the author is insane abt it in a way that intrigues me immensely"

[hooksbooks]

Favorite Ships || Megamind & Roxanne

You can’t give up. The Megamind I knew would never have run from a fight, even when he knew he had absolutely no chance of winning. It was your best quality! You need to be that guy right now. The city needs you. I need you.

[hooksbooks]

it is honestly amazing how much of writing and editing is just. logistics. like... do i use a name here or a pronoun? if i move this dialogue tag to the middle of this line and break it in half, does the end of the line hit harder that way? what if i move the tag to the front? what if i remove it entirely? ...wait, whose point of view am i in; can i reasonably say this character is appalled, or must i say they look or seem or sound appalled? is this a deliberate action or a step-removed one; is her hand closing on his shoulder, or is she closing her hand on his shoulder? environment environment environment, we need to break all this dialogue up with some narration, the scene is coming untethered. what! are! they doing! with! the rest of their bodies that are not hands! fuck fuck fuck FUCK i forgot we covered this two chapters ago and now i either need to cut this whole chunk or find a reason to reprise the conversation from earlier. name or pronoun? name or pronoun? name or pronoun? move this clause around in this sentence? oh i'll add this phrase-- nope, never mind, past!me added the same phrase two lines down. okay, if i add too much environmental narration it's going to take away from this bit, but not enough and it won't feel grounded. what if i move this to its own line? where the FUCK are their hands?

[hooksbooks]

Know your insect antennae!

[hooksbooks]

Reth and Hodari. To me <3

[hooksbooks]

— requested by manbunjon

[hooksbooks]

The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there's no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that's used to fill the empty spaces between languages

[hooksbooks]

I love when fanfic authors are freakishly unhinged. "Yes, hello, I am here to write a heart wrenching story about relationships and mortality. My medium is Ducktales (2017)"

[hooksbooks]

Performative feminism is a most annoying aspect of our times.

[hooksbooks]

hi there, just discovered your blog, binged scrolled and consumed all your posts. <3 [ sorry, i don't want to sound weird ] I have a question if you would be so kind to answer? I saw your WIP of Dear Your Holiness, and I am wondering how are you doing your speech-text bubbles? How do you make it look like texts? Is it a software? I am trying to typeset Did you miss me? - Fantismal&Krethes, and let me tell you, that is 80% text-bubbles. And I don't think what i've got going on now is very efficient. Right now i am editing the .css and .html directly in Calibre.

hi! I'm glad you like this blog, nothing weird about it, sorry about the messy house actually and be my guest!!

I really love your ask cause text bubbles are really a pain in the ass and I love babble about my typessets. So I warn you, this answer may be a bit longer than expected. 

The short is: Existing 200k ways to do chat text on writer and more 200k to do on typessets.

Editing the .css and .html directly is my first time seeing it, but I guess it works very well too, just maybe too much time consuming. In general, the most common is pre-setting a paragraph on the software you use to design your project. Most of the softwares for writers can do this. So you can select the dialog, click a button and voilá all your dialogs will look the same and your typesset will be really beautiful really fast.

Affinity and Adobe InDesign I know better, but I know Word does this too, just don't know how. Find one to learn and have joy :)))

My personal response is more like: How do you want your project to look? 

So I think the most important thing to me here is not where to do it, or how to do it fast, but how to do exactly what we want it and what we can do to make this happen. And here lives my lack of sanity. 

It really depends on the project. I have done some fic with chats and none of them I did exactly the same way. But for my Dear Your Holiness project, I want this look of a mobile chat but without remembering any social media chat we know and I want make it fancy

So I try to emulate some things we see on these social media chats and with a bit of compulsory search I discover some things really helpful.

First of all, the typography choice

I'm a little biased here, I love typography. But it is exactly because of this that I notice that chat typography is simple. They need we read fast but without notice, so we don't have serifs, that remember us of academic texts, and the contrast are really light

I had this other typesser of Wish You Are Here by @afieryfox, and she uses Discord and Twitter to set her fic, in this case I choose the exact fonts that each platform uses to set my typesset (and setting a paragraph for each site). But in the main text I use some simple serifed font, to help the reading.

Main Text: Cambria

Discord: Whitney

Twitter/X : Helvetica Neue

The same to DYH, I chose a serif font with some fancy look to the body and a saint serif font to the text, but I chose one with some alike things to do not look too drastic.

I chose to set the main text in OldStyle because it has this vintage look., and the chats on Made infinit (this one I ask permission for personal use). They pretty similar except for the g, so i think work very well

The second was the contrast. 

We had this constant that is the color of the chats, where who sends the text is the most eye-catching bubble, and the right one. So I just set this with the pov one being our dramatic bubble. In this case, our Padfoot

And the last thing, our guides and spaces!!

We are not on a mobile, so we have pretty much space and this is a problem, because chat texts are compacts and a book… not exactly. So what i did was divide the space I had to rearrange our text so we can feel like the space was purposeful

I divide my workspace in 3, and each side of the chat could only transpose ⅔. then they has their own section and don’t steal the friend's space.

this is not extremely strict, the text can transpass the line till I feel like is acceptable. So, if the text is too long and insist on cross the guide, i can shift then and make these big balloons

Other guides I like:

the space between the start of the text end the start of the bubble

the space between bubbles

the center of the text on inside de bubble

the last bubble with the call tail (idk how call this)

So

How I did my Dear Your Holiness chat bubbles?

I did all the typesset first.

I use Adobe Indesign to do my typessets, so I set up all the text blocks, with all the typos to set my pre-sert paragraphs. All my paragraphs are pre-settings cause I like my life easy when I can have it, cause the rest of the process is really time-consuming.

So set all the pre-set paragraphs and the dialogues exactly the way I want it. Till look something like this 

So I take a simple print from the naked page and go to Adobe Illustrator, were I put the the cute little outfit (the bubble)

There I have a board setting on my page size to use the correct scale on the bubbles, I just scale the print on the board and fit the bubbles on the dialogues. 

The bubbles are actually little rectangles with rounded corners. We can easily do the call tail (still don't know how call this thing) just push one off the corners staring, but I really wanted this sexy toothpaste curve, so I make this little shape and overlapped my bubble.

To put the bubbles over the print, i set the opacity on 80% or less just to confirm the guides and the * I left to mark the ones that will be big balloons. So I correct the opacity, remove the print and save as a pdf

the pdf I put above my text, and change the color of Sirius’s chat, because we can’t read black on black and voíla, -1 page to do.

Now all we need is repeat till end all dialogues bubbles left in the fic. 

After some time this became a really mechanical thing, so listen to something in that maintime that the time flies. So yes, a pain in the ass as i said, but look how pretty they turn!!!!

yeah, I think that's it

I hope I've answered

[hooksbooks]

[hooksbooks]

I want to be reading fanfic, not writing it. Unfortunately, I want to be reading very specific fanfic which I will in fact first have to write.