penguinmerchant

[penguinmerchant]

part 1

from left to right: Laurent, Damen, Nicaise, Orlant, Aimeric, Jord

[penguinmerchant]

"I can end this any time I like? I haven’t even begun."

(Some love for book 1!Laurent 🐍)

[penguinmerchant]

The year is 2037.

AI Mickey Mouse has been elected president for his second term, which is not bad, you think, because you just got a raise at work and now earn 8.25 DisneyBucks per hour, and it would be a shame if the currency crashed before you really had time to use it. And sure, under AI Mickey's first term the price of eggs had gone up to 16 DBs a dozen, but the Department of Health and Good Feelings had gotten that chicken influenza thing under control pretty fast this time, and the farm workers who were infected by the chickens had all the extra limbs they grew amputated by the government for a very modest sum (Goofy's really doing a great job as the director of Homeland Security) and so you can't help but imagine you might be able to buy some for 14, or even 12 DBs once Mickey settles into office again. And that means you'll be able to save a little, put some away for a rainy day. For a book, maybe, if you see one you like. If the militia fee isn't too much this year. And if Disney+ doesn't raise their mandatory service fee again.

You're waiting in line for your weekly ration of potable water when you feel your friend in line behind you tap your shoulder.

"Have you heard?" she asks, jumping up and down in nervous excitement, looking around to make sure no one else is listening. "There's News coming."

"News," you say, making a strange sound in your throat. "I'll believe it when I see it."

"Pacat's doing an interview tomorrow night," she says. "And she said she had Big News. She said---tomorrow, she said. It will be announced."

You put the bucket you use for water over your head so that you don't have to listen to the hope in your friend's voice, and the line crawls forward.

Despite yourself, the next night you find your feet bringing you into town, and you let your phone connect to ZuckNet, the free (and only) internet service that runs across America. For a moment you wish you brought your water bucket to put over your head so that your phone can't watch you before you remember that people had been jailed--or worse--for trying to evade such things, and so you plaster a smile on your face as you watch the three minute unskippable ad that plays, careful not to show too many teeth. The algorithm doesn't like it when it looks like you're growling.

Once the ad is over you know you'll have five uninterrupted minutes until another ad plays, and you go to your tumblr, still somehow kicking around in this desolate internet wasteland full of soulless AI (don't let Mickey hear you think that) and bots.

You search the trending tags, visit your faithful CaPri blogs. Nothing yet, and you think that maybe your friend was just joking with you, trying to get you to feel something other than apathy for once--when your breath catches in your throat. "Pacat" is trending, the blogs are lighting up, the news--no, not the news, the News, the News!--is here, spread to the small group of your fellow fans who still exist.

"Important news!" the headline says, and your phone beeps as it notices your increased heart rate, sending that information to the ad companies who will try to use it to make more targeted ads for you, "Pacat announces that next year--yes, next year in 2038, an auspicious year, really, can you even believe that it's happening--there will be a new volume of Fence!"

You blink harshly, and your phone sends out a warning tone as it loses connection with your corneal direction. You ignore it. A new Fence volume? That is...news, certainly, but not The News, nothing about CaPri, barely even about anything since there's always some Fence volume coming out every year or so, and it's fine and you're distantly glad that those who are fans of such a thing are getting fed---but where is YOUR News? Your promised CaPri News?

"And even more News," the headline continues, and you scroll down for a few minutes as you look for the second part of that headline, scrolling and scrolling as you look for something that looks like real words and not just ads targeted to drain you of every last DisneyBuck that you own, "the News that you've all been waiting for---"

"Captive Prince news is definitely still in the works! Stay tuned!"

We get new covers!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Edit: I got excited and forgot to say that this is from Pacat's newsletter!

[penguinmerchant]

"Pet" Binding (with a twist)

This binding is a little different than what I've done so far! This is "Pet" by C.S.Pacat, but with notes from @lucky-clover-gazette. The notes on this read along were SO funny and I knew I wanted to feature them in a bound work, but they wouldn't really make sense without the context of the original work. And so I mushed both the original work and the notes together!

So the idea here was to make it look like a composition notebook, complete with stickers on the front and (as we'll soon see...) drawings and scrawled notes on the inside. "Sam Reads CaPri" is the tag that Lucky Clover uses for her read along notes, and so I used it here just to make it clear this wasn't just the canon work. I used black and silver marbled paper to complete the look of the composition notebook, and more direct-to-film transfers for the "stickers" on the cover. I think it turned out fantastically!

More pics and a LOT of notes under the cut.

So I thought this was a really interesting project because I wanted to use the original work but add to it. I...acquired a PDF of Pet (let me have this one, I bought 2 official english copies of the short stories AND a Polish one I can't even read!) and messed with the margins a bit to make more room for Lucky Clover's notes. Here's what it looks like inside.

This whole thing was done in Libre Office, by the way. I'm sure there's a better program out there that would have done this WAY easier but I didn't want to have to learn how to use Adobe (or pay for it, honestly). But so the little notes are added with textboxes and placed next to their respective quotes, and the quotes themselves are highlighted with highlighters used for bibles, which is apparently a whole subset of office supplies I never knew about! I needed those highlighters specifically because I wanted to have archival color (no idea if regular highlighters are, these are just the only things that came up from a quick search) AND they're really good because they are made not to bleed through really thin bible paper. So on regular paper you can barely see them through the other side at all. They're great! Thanks bible highlighters, I know you thought you would be used for more holy purposes but really there's no better writer than Pacat, so you're in good hands!

So the other problem was that some of the notes were too long to shove into the margins, even after I had made them bigger than normal. That meant post-it notes! Now these aren't actual post-it notes, obviously (I can't imagine how terrible it would be to line those up in the printer) but I used colored printer paper and cut them to size, and it worked out. I used a bit of glue to get them down, and made it so that all of them fold away from the text so that everything is still readable. And then I made some of them poke out the top and sides, because I liked the way it looked.

There are little doodles throughout, some of which I colored in with a highlighter, and I the first word in each section is in a scribbly font, which I thought was funny. All of the notes are likewise in a handwritten font (Amanda Rose) and slightly rotated so that they're not in line with the text.

I also did not trim any of the sides of this textblock, so it's kind of uneven (deckled edges are common on the long side of the textblock, not so much on the top and bottom) but I kind of needed all the space. No endbands in this one either, I wanted to keep it more notebooky and the uneven pages meant it would have been impossible to do anyway. Everything else was bound normally, so aside from the two thousand years it took me to typeset this it was a pretty easy bind.

Oh, and last but not least, the endpapers:

Plain brown butcher paper, in honor of Berenger.

[penguinmerchant]

Trapped! Binding

My first sequel binding! From the Selkieverse series by @wrenaspun.

Since this is a sequel (or maybe an interlude would be a better description) to All This and Heaven Too, I knew I wanted to keep some of the same design elements as that binding. I kept the lighthouse illustration but changed the title area. Here's a pic of the two together.

So while the first book had the wave elements underneath the title, I wanted something different for the Trapped! binding. It's reminiscent of a net, to go with the trapped theme, and I think it plays really well with that space in the same way the original one did.

For the endpapers I went with a subtle white wave, similar but still different from the first binding's more stylized gold waves. The back of this one matches the back of the original as well.

(ignore the glue mishaps I had with this one (and also the janky cutting job I did lol) the author copy was much better I promise!)

And I reused the title page again (with the name changed, obviously) and since the title was so long on the first one and so short on the second I elongated it with a few decorative pieces.

The biggest challenge with this one was how short it was; less than 30 pages, and I had to pad it out a little with some blank pages at the end. It sits...okay in the binding, but really I don't think this kind of case is the best solution to such a short work. I didn't want to change it to something else, though, because I wanted them to look similar when they sat on the shelf. And it worked! But it was a little janky to get it in there. And the book itself sits nicely, the case closes without any problem, so I'm happy with it.

Bookcloth is duo, cover is just cardstock, designs on the front are a mix of HTV (on the bookcloth) and toner reactive foil (on the cardstock). Still can't get that toner reactive foil to work the way I want it to, but it turned out okay.

[penguinmerchant]

Short Stories Binding

I said I've been busy!

This next project is an anthology of short stories by YellowDiamonds! So this was an entirely new kind of cover for me, and I think it turned out perfectly. The font is regular HTV, but the photoshopped picture is a direct-to-film transfer. It was so easy to put down, with a little heat it set on the cover perfectly and there was no annoying weeding or peeling or anything. Getting the HTV to line up with it was the hardest part, but even that turned out great.

More info under the cut.

So here's some of the inside pages. The stories were split into these three categories, and the idea behind the borders was that canon was the most straightforward so it got a simple line border, canon divergent started to get more complicated and then alternate universe built even further on that complication. These pages are all made with toner reactive foil--I still can't seem to get the foil to have great coverage even though I used a laminator to set it, but they're still super shiny and I think it was successful.

Endpapers are very watery to go with the ocean theme on the front cover.

And here's the back just for good measure. Nothing fancy but getting that HTV to stay straight was a bitch. It's still a little wonky if you look super close but nothing as bad as my first attempt:

You can probably only see it if you zoom in, but on the first attempt the border was way too thin and it just was a nightmare to put down (this is the same bookcloth as the other pictures by the way, the lighting is just way worse in these pics). The front cover was also kind of janky and looking at it now I don't think it's even close to straight. But the real reason this cover ended up being discarded and not used was the spine:

(ignore fuzzy monster in the corner and all the junk in the back) The spine on this one was so crooked that I couldn't in good faith give this to the author. But it's okay (I say as I cry over my ruined duo bookcloth) because it was a good learning experience and the other copies turned out much better.

So yeah! The direct-to-film transfer turned out great, and it's probably something I'll use again in the future. I really like the combination of that and the HTV, it looks so snappy.

@wrenaspun, @penult

[penguinmerchant]

Full Length of the Soul binding

So I've been a busy little bee lately! Now that all these books have reached their recipients I'll start posting them, and I want to start with one of my favorites---@wrenaspun's lovely fic, The Full Length of the Soul. I wanted to do something simple for this bind (opinions may vary on whether or not I hit that target) but this came together for me really quickly, and I'm really happy with it.

More pics and details under the cut.

So the idea was for this to be a half binding, where half of the front was bookcloth and half was marbled paper. As you can see the font of the title took up quite a bit more than that, and it became more like a three quarters binding. Will I eventually regret not putting some bookcloth on the outer edge? Maybe. It's pretty sturdy paper so I hope it'll be okay.

I used some marbled cream and gold paper for the endpapers. These are the marbled jute paper from Mulberry Papers and I have two 8x11s of almost every color in my stash. Very handy for situations like this, I was able to find something perfect without needing to order anything (unlike my other bindings...)

Here's a pic of the back.

Ugh I just love it, it's way simpler than the other books I've done lately but it really gives the marbled paper a chance to shine. That paper is Crepaldi, of course, and the bookcloth is duo (I am going to LOSE IT when I run out of my stash of duo, it's beautiful and I love it so much, I don't know what I'm going to do). All the gold, including the bands on the front and back, are HTV. I did protect the marbled paper with parchment while I was ironing it on but it did surprisingly well and the heat didn't damage the paper at all.

All in all this was a very easy bind! The guillotine didn't give me any trouble and the casing in was really easy. Even the HTV went done really nicely. I forgot to take a picture of the spine before I sent it away but it's just the title and it even went on straight and everything.

[penguinmerchant]

Chapters: 1/1, 7798 words

Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Fandom: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat Relationship: Damen/Laurent Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Manhandling, Kidnapping, Politics, Secret Relationship, Romance, A beautiful two weeks in the woods

In the doorway stood a man, lithe and deadly, who looked like a character out of a storybook. He was dressed entirely in black, even his hair and face covered; only a small slit revealed his eyes, a deep extraordinary blue, and a strip of pale skin. In one hand he held a sword. The gleam of lamplight off his blade seemed to overwhelm the room. For a moment everyone stood in frozen shock, looking at this interloper.

My second Fandom Trumps Hate gift fic, this one for @folfar's generous donation to MECA!

[penguinmerchant]

Zero's Fic Binding - Archive Anthology - Stony Volume 1

A collection of fics all written by Areiton (@areiton)

let me hear (your battle cry) | chains around my daemons | monsters of sea & sky | inspired | muse

Fandom: Marvel

Ship: Steve Rogers / Tony Stark

Start Date: 10/07/24

End Date: 11/25/24

Pages: 355

First Archive Anthology book. This is a collection of 5 of my favorite Arei Stony fics. They are all also from 2021, which I did not mean to do but just so happen to realize as I was typesetting. I wanted to start this proof of concept project with someone who I A) knew and B) would be cool with me using their fics as a test.

So, the cover. She's beautiful. For the AA series, I want the covers to be the uniform - so every Stony book will copy this cover type, but the colors will shift to blue and white for Vol 2, and then back to red and gold for Vol 3. I sketched out the Iron Man that I wanted myself and made an SVG for the first time, leave me alone, adding the swoosh marks to him and to Steve's shield. I wanted a simple, classic looking font for a universal text title. This book series wont have quotes on the back so instead I have a full spread of the graphic. Tony's the icon on the spine this time - and I think he looks great~

Ah! The side shot. I used my guillotine for the first time - so the chop on this bitch is CHRISP. Headband is gold and handstitched. The whole side profile? Crispy like fall leaves.

Title page shots. A TOC (that I only notices was a little low after I had printed both copies) with a new and customized copyright page. I looked at a bunch of pages in the Renegade Bindery discord and compiled something that felt right AND specific to this project going forward.

Typesetting this was not…bad. It did take a while while I worked out fonts and overall ideas, but ones I had them I was able to fly through. There are quite a few here, so lets take a peak...

I kept Let me hear a little simple - with more medieval drop caps and banner headers. This fic is the only one with a nontypical drop caps - but with how simple the titles were I wanted a little bit more. I also - as per my standard - did this fic first, and then started to dig down and get more complicated the further in I got.

Chains has a little more flavor - each chapter has a splash of color. Originally I had hyper detailed headers for this fic, but they just look like SO MUCH, and I couldn't figure out a way to make them look uniform with the different daemons I was showcasing. Scaling back with a flash of color, but not to much, feels much better for this fic. Also realized that I need to figure out how to trim to what my printer considerers a 'full page'.

mos&s has a little more character for the headers, where I pull peace out from each chapter to add to the title. This chapter header - and the last one - are my favorite. I used hand drawn lines to highlight under each chapter title, and pulled a color for the splash image to match with both that line and the matching line breaks in the chapters.

inspired is told from Tony's point of view - so I kept the chapter titles black and white, with harder linework and a focused idea from in each of the chapters.

In contrast, muse is told from Steve's POV - so every chapter header is an explosion of color. They're all based on a variety of art mediums - spray paint, stamp art, charcoal, oil pints, anything I could find that I remember ever doing myself. I also colored each of the drop caps a contrasting color to what the header art is.

All in all, I'm very happy with how this came out. This is the blueprint I'll use for any of my Anthology books going forward. I already have at least three more in mind for Stony specifically, and then a collection of Raven Boys and Good Omens ones that are not long enough to be a book by themselves but I still want THEM ON MY SHELVES.

Thank you again Arei - your wonderful <3 Go read Arei's fics ASAP!

[penguinmerchant]

BHR 2

Okay so this stands for Black Holes and Revelations 2, which is (not surprisingly, given the name) a sequel! The premise is just basically that Laurent's brothers are worried about him because he's been acting strangely, but Laurent is just wound up because Damen's on a job that's really dangerous.

Here's a snippet. This is Laurent remembering the first time he and Damen kissed--they're hiding from enemies and Damen has just kissed Laurent to keep them from being discovered.

"Are you going to kill me?” “Almost certainly,” Laurent said, frowning. And it wasn’t a completely untruthful statement, because he knew the way his finger itched against the trigger, knew how much he wanted to press up against it—it would only take the slightest amount of pressure to set off, just a whisper, and it called to him—and he could imagine how the energy would feel in his hands when it came shooting out of the other end, making a mess of everything. He had fantasized about finally getting one up on Damianos for so long now and he desperately wanted to close this chapter between the two of them for good.  But he had never felt anything like what Damen had just done to him. Oh, he had been kissed before, sometimes of his own choosing and sometimes not, but either way it had never sparked any sort of pleasurable response in him. It was clinical, it was slightly messy and usually wet and it was, under the best circumstances, a prelude to something that was only slightly more enjoyable than what preceded it. He hadn’t known it could be like this. He hadn’t known that it was possible to feel dizzy from just one kiss, hadn’t known that there was something besides being shot at by a herd of angry Vaskians that could make his heart beat this fast, that evading blaster fire in space and smuggling illegal materials past watchful sentries wasn’t the only thing in the galaxy that felt this dangerous. He dug the blaster just a little harder into Damen’s ribs, and the smile on Damen’s face became feral, wild, and Laurent began to realize that there were others ways besides the obvious in which he wanted to see Damen powerless, defenseless, at his mercy, and when he leaned forward, just slightly, Damen was there to catch the movement—

This is 95% done. It's been sitting nearly finished in my drafts for like, two years. I just can't figure out how to end it! Maybe someday it'll see the light of day.

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🐛"I think it's time that he moves out..." (I kinda imagine Nicaise still annoying Damen for fun even when he's almost an adult, hehe.)

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The fork incident ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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[penguinmerchant]

Hey, I am really sad that your fic ends next Monday. I was always waiting impatiently for the update.

Thanks alot for the wonderful time.

This is so sweet! I had so much fun sharing this story with you all, it is very bittersweet that it's going to be over soon. But I'm glad that it's been a fun journey, and I can't wait to share what else I've been working on! 😊

[penguinmerchant]

it’s time. tell me ur favorite book you read in 2024. also least favorite if you’ve got one!

[penguinmerchant]

can i ask for a snippet of "spy"?

This is another short one! The premise was very much spy v spy (err--except without all the deaths) and a lot of that energy between them got put into Holding Out For a Hero.

This might be considerably longer than a snippet, but I thought it was fun.

“I’ve got it handled. Trust me,” Damen whispers, slipping into the next room. He quiets as he takes up space in front of the smallest painting and plants himself there, waiting for the next approach of his target. This time when the man approaches the angry huffs have matured into muttered curses, spoken just softly enough that Damen can’t quite make out any particular words, but he has the idea that they wouldn’t be very favorable to him if he could. And so he turns, regarding the man with surprise, as if he’s never seen him before in his life, like he hasn’t just followed him through four rooms of the Louvre, like they haven’t been tracking him through the city for the last three hours. “I’m sorry?” Damen says as politely as he can muster, as if the man had been doing nothing more than trying valiantly, shyly, to get his attention. “You’re sorry?” the man repeats incredulously, whirling on Damen like he’s getting ready for a fight. “You act like an animal and all you can say is sorry?  “I'm…very sorry?” “Fuck off.” “That's not very nice.”  “Neither is blocking all the best paintings with your gigantic body like you’re auditioning for the world’s most annoying curtain.” “Now I'm starting to feel offended.” “Oh, so you do have a brain cell after all.”

And then there's a lot of them chasing each other through Paris, with sleights of hand and trading their McGuffin back and forth and Damen being sure he's cornered Laurent only to watch him wave as the train pulls out of the station. Maybe if I watch a great spy movie to motivate me I'll pick this one back up!

[penguinmerchant]

Your list is full of INTRIGUING words!!!! Can I hear some more about matchbreaker and praise 👀 👀 👀

Okay so praise is just what it sounds like 😂 Damen with a praise kink. Didn't get too far on this one because after I started it I found The Tall Kingdom I Surround and basically that fic did everything I wanted to do, and it did it so well, with such great characterization that I totally lost interest in writing anything myself. Maybe someday I'll come back to it...I'm sure the fandom could always use more fics of Damen being down bad for Laurent.

Matchbreaker is my longest wip right now. Basically the premise is that it's a retelling of Emma except since it's Laurent he breaks couples up instead of getting them together. 😂 I thought it was funny. Here's a snippet of dialogue.

“First of all,” Laurent said, his voice tight, controlled in a way that made both Auguste and Damen wince, “true love doesn’t exist. The entire concept is just a psychological defense mechanism that people use to make themselves feel better about the bad choices they make, and to justify why they stay with people who make them miserable.” “Laurent—” Damen started. “And secondly,” Laurent said, turning a harsh glare on Damen, “if true love did exist, then breaking up these couples would hardly be anything except a funny anecdote to them, wouldn’t it? Because if it were true, nothing I could do or say would be enough to stop them from being together.” “No one can be expected to weather a force of nature like you,” Damen murmured. “And I know the two of you love to harp on the fact that a lot of my friends end up breaking up with their partners—” “They’re not friends, they’re targets,” Auguste muttered. “—but did you ever stop to think that maybe I’m actually encouraging true love? Do you honestly think that Pallas would still be with what's his face if I hadn’t interfered on Lazar’s behalf? And now those two have been together for, what. Two years?”

So yeah! That's that! Damen is, of course, the Mr. Knightley character, while Auguste has taken over the father role. And...everything else doesn't quite line up perfectly. But that's the jist of it!