ehyde

Binderary is February's bookbinding-intensive month, run by Renegade Bindery on discord. There are workshops and some people attempt to bind a frankly unhinged number of books.

I bound six during the month, which is a pretty nice increase over my usual pacing! All but one were nonstandard bindings, with less total amount of work, but they were experimental techniques so I think it evens out!


Speaking of bookbinding, I'm also offering a bound fanfic for the Fandom Trumps Hate crafts bazaar! The bidding has gotten intimidatingly high (this is a good thing! but I'm gonna be under so much pressure) but it's open till the 10th!

1. I finished a couple of bookbinding projects! "The Other Mountain" by nirejseki, which was a commission (but a fic I loved regardless), and then I used some of the leftover materials from that and from an older project to make a tiny binding of my own fic "The Disappearance of Madam Wen." (links go to my tumblr for pics of the bindings, and the tumblr posts link to the fics)


2. I've been reading The Smiling, Proud Wanderer and I'm about halfway through! It's the first Jin Yong novel I've read and part of why I picked this over Condor Heroes was everything I'd heard about the baffling name translation choices there. The Smiling, Proud Wanderer is a fan translation so I thought that might be safer but, guess what... It's not super prevalent, and at first it seemed to be based on whether it was important to know the meaning of a name--like, I get that it's important to know that some guy's out there calling himself Invincible! Could've gone in a footnote, but I get it. I do not get why they've translated the name Blue Phoenix.

The other reason I picked up this novel was some comments a while back in cnovels about how WWX had reminded some people of Linghu Chong, and I can see where that's coming from! Not identical characters, but there is a resemblance to be sure (and didn't Xiao Zhan play him in a video game ad once? I should track that down).
 

3. Of course I've decided to pick up a knitting project after it got cold, rather than ahead of time. But I can probably finish before spring! I'm making a balaclava/ski mask to wear while biking, and since I need to wear it under a bike helmet that ruled out any quick knits with chunky yarn. I opted for this pattern but I'm planning to swap out the colorwork for something different--yes I know the intended use case makes the colorwork hardly relevant but I'll be bored if there's nothing going on at all.


4. More bookbinding plans -- I think for most of my projects going forward, at least the ones where I do the typesetting myself, I want to work on binding novel translations rather than fanfic. I'm in the middle of binding Evil As Humans as a series of 80s-style paperbacks, which were begun as part of an exchange but I was only able to get some of the volumes finished for that and I'm still finishing them up. I've also got most of the design done for a Tai Sui binding (inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement, for Reasons), but I'm not sure if I'll dive into that project next or if I'll do something shorter first.


5. Halloween was fun! The kids dressed up as Team Rocket, with the older two as Jessie and James and the youngest as Meowth. Easier costumes than some years, Jessie and James didn't need anything sewn from scratch except for Jessie's skirt. I used Simplicity 9842 for Meowth and compared to animal costumes I've made in the past, this one seems like it was actually designed with the materials in mind -- elastic casings made with applied bias tape instead of directly from the same fake fur as the rest of the costume, for example. In the process of Halloween sewing, I fixed a couple of minor annoyances with my sewing machine, and then mended some pants (frayed/holes in the inner thighs) too. It's nice to be able to say no, I don't need to buy new pants, I can still wear these! (I hate shopping for pants in particular).
 

It's been a while since I posted any bookbinding photos here! I keep feeling like I'm not getting as many projects done as I'd like, but looking back, I've made a pretty decent number this past year. I'm not going to post full writeups or full photosets here, but brief descriptions + one photo each under the cut, and links to their tumblr posts if you'd like to read more details.



For my birthday I got a folding light tent for taking book photos -- I used it on the most recent book. It's a little smaller than I expected so I may eventually take the LED ring from it and build into a larger box. For now, with a little photoshop around the edges it's fine.

Because of a bookbinding project, I read Vorkosigan saga fanfic for the first time (I liked the books but never sought out the fandom) and then roped myself into a partial series reread. I'm having fun but boy does Barrayar hit differently after experiencing both pregnancy and pregnancy loss.

Relatedly I have learned to warp text and I figured out probably not the most efficient way of outlining a block of text (rather than outlining individual letters), but a way of doing it, at least. I had to get the free trial of Affinity Designer 2 to do warped text, but I'm going to see if Inkscape can do it. I don't do enough vector drawing to need a program I have to pay for (and I don't see myself making that many Baen Books style title pages, either).

I'm slowly working my way through Qi Ye by Priest, although I'm not super far along yet. Pretty much all I knew for a long time was "it has some of the same characters as TYK" or possibly even "it's a prequel to TYK" and "people who only watched WOH don't know about Literal Toddler Murderer Zhou Zishu" and well, I bounced off of Word of Honor, and child death is one of my major nopes, so I had this filed away as not interested for a while. But then I learned a bit more about the actual plot of this novel, and saw it recced with a "if you want political intrigue" note (I did; I'd just finished A Memory Called Empire and thoroughly enjoyed it after bouncing off some Hunt For Red October fic that smoothed out the politics too much) and so, after asking for some clarification about the child death thing, I picked it up.

The premise is it's a time travel fix-it, but with a twist: the main character, Jing Beiyuan, experienced not just one life that went badly, but the following five reincarnations as well, reincarnating alongside the same person each time. Instead of jumping at the chance to make things right between them (as you'd expect in a time travel fix it fic) he's...well he's not quite at "man, fuck this guy" but more "I don't have any feelings for you whatsoever." However, he still needs to make sure he ends up on the throne, that's just good sense...and meanwhile there's this new guy who wasn't there in his first life.

Things I like so far: the twist on the genre. The fact that Jing Beiyuan doesn't even try to act like a realistic child. And I just like him a lot in general.
Things I like less: it feels a bit slow paced so far, and I think that's contributing to my own slow pace reading. I'm also kinda sideeyeing Priest's fantasy foreign culture because this is three for three of her books I've read where she's had a culture with a "noble savage" feel to it and while the characters themselves are fine the vibes are. Yeah.

I ended up giving up on Lie Huo Jiao Chou (Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire, by priest). I think a lot of it had to do with the translation quality but ehh... not all of it. It just felt--disjointed? Stuff kept happening, but not the stuff that I cared about, nor the stuff that felt important? Something just wasn't clicking. And to be completely honest the main couple was not doing it for me. Well. Actually their backstory was *excellent* but then--anyway it was frustrating, I wanted to care about the characters and the book a lot more than I actually did. If the other translation (that stopped around ch70) ever picks it up again (or if it turns out they stopped because they're working on the official, or something) then I miiight pick it up again but until then, probably not. It's annoying because this is the second priest novel I read and Tai Sui was so good and I think I just kept--expecting there to be more here than there was. Anyway, I was going to read SPL next, but I decided to take a break and read some other stuff first.

I figured out how to, uh, copy library ebooks, so now there's no due date guilt hanging over me! I browsed their currently available sff and read "Light from Uncommon Stars" by Ryka Aoki, which was engaging and enjoyable, although it felt like it was trying very hard to be Popular on Tumblr in that like, hopepunk way, which could get a little too much at times. The story centers around Katrina, a young violinist who has run away from her transphobic family, and the teacher who takes her in--who has made a deal with hell to offer up the souls of seven students in exchange for her own freedom, and Katrina is the seventh. There are also aliens.

After that I picked back up a different cnovel that I had put down for a while, Mr Melancholy Wants to Live a Peaceful Life, which is a double secret identity story where one half of the married couple is secretly a transmigrator who has defeated thousands of worlds, stolen power from the System, and just wants to have a quiet retirement, and the other half of the couple works for a secret organization that keeps transmigrators from wreaking havoc on their world. There were a lot of things I liked here, and several things I didn't like. Mostly, the one-sided reveal--where one knew the other's identity, but the other didn't know his--lasted way too long. And I honestly wasn't really enjoying the main couple's dynamics, although that greatly improved once they both knew each others' identities (I really really don't like jealousy plots, and there was some of that there). But I did really enjoy the plot (the System, transmigrators, saving not just one but several worlds). There were no female characters. Zero. None at all. Which was strange because I think Cyan Wings can write female characters just fine? idk, it was weird. The first two extras were also weird and fatphobic and added nothing. I realize I'm not doing very much to sell this book but I do want to say that the parts I liked, I liked a lot.

Anyway, now I have promised my sister I will read at least one Dorothy Sayers.

I finished watching the donghua version of Are You OK and I am very pleased with it.

The basic premise is, what if there were just a shitton of transmigrators? What would that do to the world? If you've ever read 1632 by Eric Flint (I realize there may not be a lot of overlap in audience here) it's kind of like that, except that instead of a group getting physically yeeted to, well, 1632, it's transmigration en masse to a fictional wuxia setting.

The main character as much as there is one is Lou Zhu, transmigrator, businessman, in charge of verifying the identity of new transmigrators. Because all transmigrators must be properly registered, of course. The emperor is...very interested in them.

While Are You OK starts out as a comedy, it gets pretty serious by the end, and really does follow through with the implications of what might happen if a wuxia world got access to modern tech. And because the transmigrators aren't the only ones allowed to have grievances against the emperor, we have his brother Prince Yu ad another notable character.

Things I liked about the adaptation: streamlined many of the events from the novel in a way that mostly worked, added some new plot points which tied different sections of the novel together (the novel is actually a series of interconnected short stories). The donghua also added a couple more female characters, one completely donghua original and one a major expansion of a background non-character.

Things I didn't like in the adaptation: a lot of the visual anachronism gags left me confused about how much modern technology Liang was already supposed to have. Prince Yu and Li Ke's relationship felt underdeveloped compared to the novel--although this probably shouldn't surprise me too much. From the donghua, you wouldn't guess that this was originally a danmei, and to be completely fair, it was kind of hard to tell in the novel, too. But Prince Yu and Li Ke were the two I shipped the most and all of that is pretty much gone.

Okay I said that about the anachronism gags but I will never get tired of Lin Kai, leader of the martial alliance, constantly showing up fifteen minutes late with bubble tea.

The donghua is available free to watch on iQiyi. So far there's only one season (which covers somewhere between a third and half the novel, I think) but there's a preview for season 2. The novel is locked on jjwxc and taken down by the translator, but if you're interested, let me know.

- My mom's visiting this week and next and helping out with various projects around the house--rather than wanting to do whole family activities all the time, her idea of a visit is "I want to see you, but give me something to do." Highly relatable tbh. Before I knew about terms like "hyperfocus" I'd call that thing where you get really involved in what you're working on "project mode" and my mom does project mode too, and also gets really bored if she doesn't have a project.

- guess-that-ship seems like a fun tournament blog and submissions for the next round open today. The idea is to describe a ship in anonymized terms and people vote on which ship appeals to them more, without knowing who the characters are. I tried to come up with a good entry for Xi Ping/Zhou Ying but so far I haven't come up with anything that sounds quite right, but I've got a different ship ready to send in.

I feel like I should post about some good things to balance out that last post (and for myself, too. It IS good to remind myself of the good things).

❧ Our tart cherry tree has a really excellent crop this year. We already picked enough for a pie (and made the pie) and there's more still on the tree that'll be ready in a few more days.

❧ I finally have some concrete book design ideas for You Yao/Are You OK, and I tracked down the untranslated extras (the novel is locked on jjwxc, so it wasn't just a matter of buying them unfortunately).

❧ I took my bike to the shop for a tuneup (storytime: my father in law decided to give me a bike he didn't want to take with him when he was moving, so he left it at our place, only he didn't tell us he was doing that, so I let it sit outside for like two years thinking it was our downstairs neighbor's, and only realized otherwise when he moved and didn't take it with him). The two oldest kids are steady enough on their own bikes that I only have to figure out how to manage biking with the youngest, which sounds--doable!

❧ My mom's visiting soon, which should be mostly good--she's iffy about a few things, but apparently did ultimately come down on the side of being supportive when my sibling came out as nonbinary so she might be better about it this year than she was last summer. (I'm probably never even going to mention my own gender questioning to her tbh, but 4yo is also genderfluid and that's more important).

❧ I recently read Copper Coins, a historical/supernatural danmei featuring a monk with amnesia and a dragon searching for his stolen bones (the two things may be connected). It didn't grab me in a fic-writing way but I did enjoy it enough that I'm starting one of the author's other novels, Cultural Relics Are Not To Be Disturbed, which is an urban fantasy, and I'm not very far along but it's fun so far.

Apparently Priest announced that Tai Sui will be edited/revised this year or next, which has caused me to rearrange my bookbinding plans a little bit (I mean, I don't know if the translator will do anything with the revisions anyway, but it's at least worth waiting a bit to see). But I wasn't anywhere close to ready to bind it anyway so it's not a big deal. It's good news I think--I loved the book but there were definitely some places where the pacing suffered a bit.