thetriballibrarian

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Kazura Bridge

bbkaorun

[thetriballibrarian]

Heaven Official's Blessing (TGCF)

This is my first book series, and what a way to start! Heaven Official's Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu is an epic Chinese novel spanning 2000 years and, in my case, 2276 pages. Made up of five arcs, I ended up making six books since the third arc was massive.

I wanted the books to look uniform at first glance but also capture the color and joy that the series has brought me. These are all three piece bradel, with gray silk moire on the spine and a bunch of colorful silk moires for the covers. The hanzi is all inset with the rest of the cover layered over the top (swiftly becoming my preferred cover design technique). All writing and illustrations were done via foil quill on my Cricut.

I also marbled coordinating endpapers for each of the books.

TGCF is full of motifs and I crammed as many in as I could. The red string is continuous across all title pages (I also used red thread for sewing).

I did custom borders and chapter headers for the present (Arcs 1, 3, and 5), past (Arc 2), and distant past (Arc 4).

The above graphics, in addition to custom text dividers meant I got a crash course in creating Inkscape vectors, which was stressful but ultimately fun and VERY useful for future projects.

(not shown - the literal two months of me designing, deleting, redesigning, deleting, etc. the vine motif. Two. solid. months.)

Keeping the textblocks and covers the exact same size was a whole challenge and a half and not something I usually worry about, but I have learned so much while making these!

See below for my geeking out over Chinese art history (includes very mild spoilers for TGCF).

I really wanted to emphasize the grand scale of time in the story. There's the present day, with flashbacks to 800 years prior, and history going back a further 1200 years. A lot can change over 2000 years and I wanted to show that passage of time.

My inspiration started when I visited the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. One of the exhibits was on the city of Anyang from the Shang Dynasty (1250 BCE - 1050 BCE). I was immediately struck by the complexity and geometric rigidness of art from over 3000 years ago, like in this bronze wine vessel. Also they had the cutest dragons.

The more I learned about the Shang Dynasty, the more fascinated I became by the art style and the period in general (oracle bones!). A lot of "fantasy ancient China" tends to use steel swords and I wanted Xie Lian to feel like he was coming from the Bronze Age, which would add to his fascination and geekery over Hua Cheng's weapons collection. I also thought some of those motifs from the above wine vessel would make for fantastic chapter headers!

Eventually I settled on Xie Lian coming from the Han period (202 BCE - 220 CE), which would have been at the beginning of the Iron Age but would also put Wuyong around the time of the Shang Dynasty and still allow Fang Xin to be a bronze sword (I know the description is steel, shh, and yes, I did base the design of the text divider on a bronze sword but with a Han-era hilt). I set the present day right around the time of the Tang Dynasty (618 CE - 907 CE). And now it was time to find auspicious motifs!

Arcs 1, 3, and 5 has a Tang vine motif which I based on this box.

Arc 2 has a Han ocean waves motif, based on this bronze mirror.

In homage to my fascination by the Shang art style, and as a nod to the influence of a certain Prince of Wuyong, Arc 4 has a Shang cloud and thunder motif, based on the very wine vessel I saw at the Smithsonian.

I also changed the hanzi on the title pages and covers depending on the period. Arcs 1, 3, and 5 use a Tang period script. Arc 2 has a clerical script, which would have been more commonly used in the Han period, and Arc 4 has the closest thing I could get to oracle bone script - small seal script.

For the cover design, I mimicked the above bronze mirror, which were popular in the Han period and often highly decorated on the backside. This particular style, also called the TLV mirror, is thought to have cosmological representations with a square world surrounded by the waves of the cosmic ocean. Although my design is not historically accurate, I did try to mimic the "world" of TGCF, surrounded by the cosmos of the historical periods, with the vine leaves standing in for the eight pips commonly placed around the world.

(Bonus in-progress pics: this is the most math I've had to do for any book)

[thetriballibrarian]

The moles are just too easy to sniff out I think

[thetriballibrarian]

eye of the tiger plays as i enthusiastically jump out of bed and hit my head on an overhead lamp and remain unconscious for the rest of the day

[thetriballibrarian]

A spoon's only objective in life is to make soup go upwards, and it knows this. That's why when you put one under a running tap it blasts the water way high. The spoon thinks there's suddenly TONS of soup to deal with and it freaks out.

[thetriballibrarian]

Just stumbled on to this woman's tiktok about polygamy, and she's spinning it as a good thing because she would have less burden as a wife.

Girl. Where do I start.

[thetriballibrarian]

Ivan Kramskoi - Village courtyard in France (1876)

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[thetriballibrarian]

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Medusa was kinda problematic  :/

[thetriballibrarian]

[thetriballibrarian]

Stupeur chez les comploplo, Candace Owens n’a en fait aucune preuve que Brigitte Macron est un homme. Sont tout déçus les biquets.

[thetriballibrarian]

So on the 27th DeepSeek R1 dropped (a chinese version of ChatGPT that is open source, free and beats GPT's 200 dollar subscription, using less resources and less money) and the tech market just had a loss of $1,2 Trillion.

Source

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[thetriballibrarian]

this was my workday today, and literally every Monday in any office any where

[thetriballibrarian]

"hey why are all the barrier garments like linen shirts or chemises or combinations going away?"

"oh we have more washable fabrics now! you don't need to worry about sweat reaching your outer clothing when you can just chuck it in the washing machine!"

"cool!"

[100 years later]

"so uh all of those new washable fabrics are leaching microplastics into our water, and the constant machine-washing wears garments out faster. they're also not really sturdy enough to be mended, so we keep having to throw them out and now the planet is covered in plastic fabric waste that will never break down. also it turns out that the new washable fabrics hold odor-causing bacteria VERY well. so could we get those barrier garments back please?"

"sorry babe linen now costs $100000/yard and since it's been so long without them, nobody knows how to adapt barrier garments to the current styles anyway"

"..."

"maybe try this new $50 undershirt made of Special Sweat-Wicking Plastic Fabric! :) :) :)"

[thetriballibrarian]

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