ehyde

So far, all of the fics I've printed and bound for myself have been works I've already read and enjoyed. Because A) it's a lot of work for something I don't know if I'll enjoy, and B) knowing the story helps with the book design, from color scheme to font choices.

This past winter I participated in a bound fic exchange with renegadepublishing, where participants could put forth the names of up to five fics for our exchange partner to bind. I decided to choose fics that had been on my to-read list for a long time, that I knew I wanted to read but hadn't. Since it wasn't me doing the work or making the design choices, A and B from above didn't apply. Reading fic for the first time in print would be a novelty experience, and while I didn't expect it to alter my enjoyment of the fic at all, I thought it would be fun.

My exchange partner went above and beyond and gave me not just one but two typeset and handbound books: "With Absolute Splendor" by Lise, and "won't take the easy road" by twigofwillow. I received them a few weeks ago and finally sat down and read the first of them today. (One thing about reading fic in print: all the things that make it harder to read "real books" still apply.) I really enjoyed it! Good fic (postcanon Jiang Cheng pov, reconciliation), and it was--well, I don't want to get all pretentious and say the experience of reading a physical book is profoundly different from reading online. It was mostly just reading a fic, you know? But as predicted, it was indeed fun.

Current Mood: content

So I'm working on another book project, and what happened was I found some cheap drawing paper at the craft store and said to myself, this feels like an old paperback, I should make a book out of this. And my first thought was something horror ish, because this was about a week before Halloween, so I picked out one of my favorite horror ish fics, and printed it on that paper, and it looked good, and eh whatever if it's not archival quality, it's cool right?

...and then the fic's author (who hasn't seen any of this yet) posted a very intense thread on twitter about how we're losing so much history because of books printed on acidic paper that are literally disintegrating and I therefore reprinted the entire thing .

I've been thinking lately about how I'm not sure if I'll ever want to cosplay again. In a "hobbies change and that's ok" way but also in a scary, wow if I let all my hobbies go maybe I really will become boring and have to join the PTA sort of way. Cosplay was something I really enjoyed for a long time! But, hm. My favorite part of cosplay was always "figuring out how to make something really cool." Not hanging out at conventions, I'm to shy for that to not be stressful (shoutout to the wheel of time track at dragoncon, you were chill, I miss you). I definitely don't enjoy the "hoping people on the internet see my pictures" part of cosplay.
But right now, I'm getting that same craftsmanship satisfaction from bookbinding! It's got the artistic, creative element, it's got the finicky details element, and it's got the fannish element - and as a bonus, it produces something that has in theory more long-term use. So I guess yeah... maybe even when I "have time to cosplay again" I... won't? And I might not even miss it.

Current Mood: nostalgic

I finished (well, almost - the extras aren't quite all translated) You Yao/Are You OK, and oh boy...it started out so funny...

The premise: transmigration is common. Hundreds of people from the early 21st century have died and found themselves in fantasy ancient China. It's a known phenomenon. Some people try to impersonate transmigrators to earn a position in the imperial court. One of our main characters almost succeeds, until he gets found out for not knowing simplified Chinese.

It's written as a series of short stories, rather than a single continuous novel, which I really liked. The first three focus on different sets of characters, after that, they begin interweaving, and that's when it becomes clear that this isn't just a comedy/genre parody. The author goes all in on the implications of what a world of transmigrators would mean, there are conspiracies, political intrigue, revenge plots, things that you thought were one-off jokes coming back in the worst way, knowledge of the future not being an easy solution, some really interesting characters... it's listed as a danmei but there's barely any focus on romance (in a way that's like - these characters are intended to be shipped, but that's not what we're here for today - and I guess that danmei label is doing a lot of work there, when the shippable moments aren't really more than you get for some noncanon slash pairings in some western media? Anyway.)

So yes, I do recommend this! The main story is fully translated, there's one extra that isn't translated yet. Don't go into this expecting everything to wrap up nicely in a happy ending, though it's not what I'd call a bad ending, either. It's complicated, which kind of feels like the point of the story.

https://www.novelupdates.com/series/are-you-ok/

Still working on bookbinding, working now on two different projects - the first one is suffering from second sock syndrome, as I'm making a copy for myself and a copy for the author. I did most of the work in parallel, but the cover is embroidered, and - originally I was working on the second project because I wanted to do part of it while my sister is visiting, but it soon became clear I wasn't going to get to that step before she had to leave, but I kept working on that book because it was more fun than embroidery.

But I did learn some new things! Sister taught me some resin craft, and I made a few dice. I'm going to make a translucent resin window in a book cover, in theory, so this was color testing for that - but I learned that fountain pen ink does not work to color resin.

I also learned that tracing paper/vellum cannot be pasted down without excessive wrinkles, so my original plan of using it to make made endpapers had to be scrapped. But in the process I also learned that mulberry tissue paper (unryu paper) behaves beautifully pasted down, so I ended up with a result I liked even better than my original plan.

And tonight I went back to the embroidery! It's slightly closer to being finished.

Current Mood: creative

Very belatedly, posting this here.

I saw a post about fandom bookbinding (fanbinding) and I thought, oh, neat! I could do that! It's not that I wasn't aware of the concept of making pretty, physical copies of fanfics--tarrlok and clockworkspider made me gorgeous printed copies of two of my fics. But this was the first time I'd seen it with traditional bookbinding, cloth covered hardbacks, that kind of thing. (I also thought hey, I could actually make my own print copy of MDZS, which is less relevant now).

The fanbinding discord is neat, too. Many people with strong opinions about archiving and preserving fic. I think I'm in it less for that cause and more as a type of fanart? But yeah.

Anyway though I decided to make a blank book first, as a tutorial project, which is what's pictured here. I'm already working on a book with words in it though and it's nearing completion.

Current Mood: accomplished

"Sure, I'll try to post on here every couple of days, at least!"

So, yeah. That's working out. But I was rapidly approaching the "I faild therefore I can never navigate to dw again without feeling intensely guilty" point and there are definitely things I want to READ here, even if I don't have much to say, so. Here goes!

The most exciting thing in my life lately has been watching trees grow, and it's spring, so that's not actually a statement about how boring my life is. I have three hopefully-pre-bonsai in little pots, and the bigger mulberry in a bigger pot, and both the trees that I uprooted from the ground are showing signs of new life! Definitely checking the mulberry more than strictly necessary to see if it grew any more in the past *checks watch* five hours, but hey, sometimes it actually does!

Garden azalea (it had been chomped by rabbits down to these sticks), probably-cedar from my mother-in-law's yard, and grocery store lemon cypress. These are not, like. Actual bonsai. But I like having them.

Do people name their plants? Is that a thing?

...was yesterday, but I didn't get a chance to post this before going to bed.

I won this fountain pen in an online auction. Not my first vintage pen, but the first I bought online.

a vintage fountain pen with pinstripe pattern

a vintage fountain pen with pinstripe pattern

What happened was: I was bemoaning that while I had a Chenqing pen to go with my WWX notebook, I still didn't have a great pen to match my LWJ notebook. @tunalaq.twitter suggested looking for something that echoed the look of his guqin, to follow the theme, so I typed in "pinstripe fountain pen" to see what would come up. This...obviously isn't what I was going for, but I thought it was really neat.

Arnold pens were apparently the cheap knockoff of their day, so I wasn't expecting anything in perfect condition. Almost surprisingly, the sac appears to be intact. But the feed doesn't really work--it doesn't bring the ink to the nib. The nib itself is great, though! It's a flex nib, and I've been wanting to have one of those for a while, and so far, it seems to work fine in my Moonman pen. I'd be pretty happy with this purchase if the nib was the only thing I got out of it.

vintage nib in modern moonman pen, with a writing sample

vintage nib in modern moonman pen, with a writing sample

But I'm not going to stop there--look at this:

vintage body side by side with modern Pilot section and converter

Those two sections look the same size...I wonder if I could make a frankenpen?

Current Mood: satisfied

I took part in the MXTX Remix event, which was my first time doing an exchange like that. It was a cool experience. The author I was assigned has written some absolutely stunning, deep relationship studies and for a while I was just--completely blanking on how I could do them justice with any sort of response.

"at the plinth of greater things" by

bloodletter is a nieyao fic, set pre-canon, during Meng Yao's time in the Unclean Realm. There is a brief scene where Mianmian visits (as part of a Jin sect delegation). Usually my brain is set firmly in novel-canon mode and so I don't think of Mianmian as part of the Jin sect, but I decided to take this scene and expand on it from her pov, and try to draw some parallels between her position close to Jin Zixuan, and Meng Yao's with Nie Mingjue. Kind of functioning as an outsider pov to the nieyao relationship, except that she's a canon character? And exploring the question of, what does it mean (what does it look like, to anyone familiar with his father) for Jin Zixuan's closest friendship to be with a woman, when he's been engaged to someone else since birth, and what might that mean for Mianmian?

This is what I wrote: "the one who stays by your side" I feel a little bad that I wrote something this short, but I have been reminding myself that the low wordcount requirement is what let me sign up for the event in the first place, so I shouldn't feel guilty about it.

The original version of the novel had this internal monologue from Jin Guangyao's perspective, right after Mianmian leaves her sect:

In his mind though, he thought, “There you go again, Big Brother. The hell is integrity? Can you eat it? She spent so much time and effort climbing up from a servant to a disciple, but took off her clan’s robes in a moment of anger. Many years of hardships disappeared like running water, and for what? Even if she was displeased, she should have grit her teeth and climbed up even higher, and killed all of the people who mocked her today. Wouldn’t that have been a better way to get rid of her hatred? This beauty is quite foolish. If someone wanted to talk about integrity and honor, they shouldn’t go farther than this.

(translation via

qinghe-nie)
It was edited out of the final version, and it only vaguely relates to my fic, but *shrugs* I just think it's neat!

( Under the cut: some fic I've enjoyed reading this week )

Like, I assume, many, I have Acquired Houseplants during the pandemic. I held off till September, when I picked up two tiny free succulent propagations from a "free plants" box set by the side of the bike path. I'm not sure exactly what they are, but they're still growing! I then bought a few plants at Trader Joe's, and they're doing good too (although the fern still looks...interesting). But then I got interested in bonsai. And, well, it was not the right season to do anything with bonsai, but I watched a lot of videos (Peter Chan's youtube channel is both informative and relaxing, I recommend it). I mentioned my interest in the weeks before Christmas, and my mother in law showed up with five baby trees she'd dug up from her yard. It wasn't really the best time to dig them up and only one survived into the spring, but one is better than none. There's another young tree growing too close to our house, I think white mulberry, that I want to try to uproot and cut the top off of and see if I can keep it growing in a pot. Possible in theory and rapidly approaching the right time of year to try. I'm actually very excited about this one, although I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much--where it's growing means getting enough of the roots out, undamaged, may be very tricky. I still haven't quite figured out how to manage outdoor yardwork and watching kids at the same time, but this year I should be able to get a little more done than last year, at least. With that in mind we started a tray of vegetable seeds, and bought some flower bulbs and two raspberry bushes. Tomorrow's supposed to be good weather, so we'll try to get those in the ground.

Current Mood: content

Last Saturday, I finished up fics for two different exchanges that were due on the same day. This is big! For a long time I'd felt like trying to do any event with a deadline would be a lost cause. These both had low wordcount requirements, so it wasn't too much of a challenge, but the knowing that I can do it is a big win for me.

One of them is revealed already, so I can share it here: "out of the dark," a short Wen Ning/Nie Huaisang for the MDZS rarepairs exchange lightning round!

I also posted another fic this weekend, "Feathers, Drifting Down," part of my ongoing wingfic au. It is pure xiyao fluff...okay, with a little bit of angst mixed in, but listen. It's fluff.

And, that "knowing that I can do it?" I signed up for a minibang! The Solstice Bang, which is a MDZS minibang themed around mythical creatures...of course I can't say what I have planned but I can say that it's not the extensive mermaid au that I've been thinking about for well over a year now (that's more than I actually want to write for this...and actually possibly more suited to being an original work, now that I think about it). Aside from that, I'm also trying to finally finish up "Butterfly Effect," and yes, I realize I've been saying that for months now. It's going to happen.

I have a lot of personal life updates too, but I think I will save that for another post.

Current Mood: accomplished

30 Days of The Untamed 2 -- favorite episode
Oh jeez, I'm expected to remember what happened in which episode now? It's all a blur~
*one quick trip to wikipedia later*
26! Wei Wuxian going after Wen Ning, Wei Wuxian terrorizing the Jin sect, Wei Wuxian leading the Wen remnants to saftey through the pouring rain...look, I too want to protect Wen Ning and I love a powerful and terrifying Yiling Patriarch and I love when the series shows its creepy side and I also love painful looks of longing in the rain (though that one might've been in the next episode, I don't recall precisely where the break was)

A discord server I'm in has a weekly writing event with short prompt fills, here's what I wrote last night. It's the setup to an AU where Mo Ziyuan (Mo Xuanyu's cousin) wasn't an awful person (but the rest of his family still was). Novel-verse, but that's only relevant here for the specifics of the body-sacrifice ritual. Content warnings for suicide, blood.

( Read more... )

(I am not sure how to make things I copied from google docs have the same font/size)

1. How I started watching--I'd been in the novel fandom for almost a year when the drama came out. I remember some people in the fandom were eagerly anticipating it and some were (mostly due to production rumors that I won't go into here) dreading it, but after the first six episodes aired, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Up till then I'd been kind of "well, I'll get around to watching it someday" because my visual media consumption is...very, very low. But suddenly I was interested...and those first six episodes weren't subbed yet. Oops. It became a challenge to avoid looking ahead too much at spoilers and I had to mute a few chinese-speaking people I followed on twitter for the duration of the drama.
tl;dr, it was pretty much a given that I would watch it eventually but I didn't expect it to pull me in the way it did

I was going to start the snowflake challenge too but I ended up spending most of my evening on a cat costume for my 3yo (the first convention where she chose her own costume is tomorrow, and she wanted to dress as our cat). Maybe another day!

Current Mood: creative

I must confess that instead of writing these past few days, I've been playing with pens and ink. I bought a blank swatch book and have been cataloguing my bottled ink.

Along with these I have just as many samples still to do. So, my inks are heavily weighted towards purple (by choice) and blue (by virtue of a few freebies). Looking at this, l want more greens and browns.

I also got a clear-bodied Platinum Preppy to use as a dedicated invisible ink pen (because I don't want a pen that'll dry out) and I'm modding it some to hopefully make it look a little classier. So far: removed the plastic clip, and sanded the body to create a frosted glass look.

Current Mood: artistic

I keep telling myself I ought to be more active here, and keep failing, mostly because I find using dw from my phone extremely frustrating (and I have much more access to my phone than my computer these days) and because previously, my fandoms and fandom friends were primarily active elsewhere.

But!

Happened to check back here and it seems that Mo Dao Zu She/The Untamed has a much bigger presence than it used to! Which, The Untamed didn't even exist the last time I posted here, so. Not unexpected.

Anyway, I might start posting here more often! If the 1yo sleeps better this evening (he was diagnosed with another ear infection today) I might even be back with some real content.

I finished the hanahaki-as-torture fic I was writing. This was really out of my sandbox as a writer--darker than most of my fics, first time I wrote dubcon, also the first time I wrote a sex scene...I'm pleased with the result but I must immediately go write fluff now. But here it is!

Love in a Nightless Garden (9111 words) by EHyde
Chapters: 4/4
Fandom: 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Relationships: Wen RuoHan/Meng Yao
Characters: Meng Yao, Wēn Ruòhán
Additional Tags: Wen Qing (supporting role), original characters (supporting roles), Hanahaki Disease, Torture, Medical Procedures, Dubious Consent, Mind Control, weird flower sex, Canon Compliant
Summary:

To treat the flower-spitting sickness, there is a little-known third option. A skilled surgeon can carefully carve out the infection, transplant it to a new host, and—if it survives the process—not only the flowers, but all the love that bore them, will take root.

For Wen Ruohan, this is a form of torture. His enemies have died in agony, all the while desperately in love with him.

For Meng Yao, suspected of treason, it is his only chance to stay by Wen Ruohan's side.

It hasn't gotten nearly as many kudos as the rest of my fics, but I suppose that's expected with the combination of the warnings and the rarepair (which--I don't understand why WRH/JGY is a rarepair though, I really would have thought more people would be into that? But there are only 5 fics. WRH/JFM has 17. Oh well.)

-

Remember how I said I was cosplaying Wen Qing? Well, I got distracted by writing the above fic and ran out of time for complicated applique, decided to cosplay Wen Ning instead, and immediately became 100% more motivated to finish. Turns out I wanted to cosplay Wen Ning all along and had just decided not to because of body image issues (can't bind flat while breastfeeding, etc).

Wen Ning and A-Yuan cosplay

You can't even really see the costume details in this pic but you CAN see my daughter as A-Yuan and that's what matters. My son was semi-cosplaying Baby Jin Ling (by which I mean--yellow onesie with a white flower on it) but he slept through most of the convention.

Current Mood: accomplished

I keep forgetting that this site exists, so here's a bit of an update of what's been going on the past month or so.

I posted the zombie!Jin Zixuan fic! I tagged it "not quite a fix-it" because it's not exactly a happy ending, but still, a few more people are alive than in canon (Jiang Yanli and Wen Qing, specifically). It's interesting what people latch onto, though--I gave Mo Xuanyu a very minor appearance in the coda, and he does not get a happier ending, and so many of the comments were people feeling sad for him, specifically.

And I told myself that after finishing that fic, it was time to set writing aside until my cosplay was finished, but it's hard to turn off one's writer-brain. Last year in akayona fandom, clockworkspider introduced me to the concept of Hanahaki disease with this Suwon&Hak fic. I didn't really get into the trope at the time because while I find the aesthetics and body horror aspect super appealing, the sort of angsty romance that it usually inspires is less my thing. However, it was brought to the forefront of my imagination again, and I played around with it a bit with some mdzs ideas (I altered the rules a bit, but it's not like it's a real illness, after all).

Supposing that a) falling out of love does not cure the disease and b) the surgery to remove the flowers takes away not only your memories of the person, but also your ability to feel any strong emotions toward them -- Nie Huaisang fell for Jin Guangyao before Nie Mingjue died, and is left coughing flowers for him even after learning that Jin Guangyao murdered his brother. He dare not have them removed before his revenge is complete, but cutting them out after it's over will mean that everthing that gave his life meaning for the last ten years is gone.
Besides hope the other person loves you back and cutting the flowers out, there's a third option--cut them out without killing them and transplant them to a new host. As long as the plant doesn't die, your feelings won't either--and they'll be duplicated in the new host. Wen Ruohan uses this as a form of torture--enemies have died in agony all the while desperately in love with him. He also, as in the case of Meng Yao, has been known to use it as a test of loyalty.

In the midst of these somewhat darker ideas the only thing I was able to actually write was fluff, so here's a little short of toddler A-Yuan playing with a funny paper doll he found (aka WWX testing out the paperman spell).

As far as cosplay goes, it's progressing slowly. I'm making Wen Qing's outfit in a slightly-more-historically-accurate design simply because that means more straight seams, but baby has been waking up a lot at night and I'm lucky to be able to sew more than one or two seams a day. Still, I'm not giving up on it yet!

Current Mood: busy

One of my friends created a lovely wingfic au for MDZS, winged humans living in the modern era, that sort of deal, and it was excellent, but I kept thinking about moving it to the canon setting. And a couple more ideas wouldn't leave me alone, either--the image of Wen Ruohan as a tyrannical angel, and the idea of Lan Sizhui having some feature that would openly reveal his Wen heritage. So here's a canon-setting wingfic au where it's mostly the Wens who are winged, crossposted from my tumblr/twitter.

After a magical adventure that’s lost to history, both Wen Mao and Baoshan Sanren grew wings (the official Wen account says he was blessed by a god, but that version doesn’t mention BSSR, so take it with a grain of salt). Since then, all of Wen Mao’s descendants have grown wings shortly after developing their golden core. It was assumed to be genetic, until BSSR’s disciples who descended the mountain had wings, too. Wei Wuxian inherited wings from his mother. ( (the rest under here) )

After I posted this, clockworkspider suggested the image of Jin Guangyao slowly unfurling his wings while playing guqin for Nie Mingjue, and it seems that wings are what it takes to get me to take up drawing again, so I drew this. I'm out of practice.

( picture )
I'm also finally getting started with my cosplay! I keep hearing about all these supposed "rules" for MDZS cosplay, but I'm ignoring them. It seems that the point of the rules is to get people to buy the official costumes, but for me, making a costume is the entire point of cosplay, so I was never a potential customer in the first place. Plus, the only Wen Qing costume I've seen for sale isn't even screen-accurate.

I'll be basing my costume on the donghua designs, except I hate using flat solid colors in cosplay (for me the goal is NOT to look like I stepped out of a cartoon) so I'm using some textured fabric. For about six years I've held onto a piece of red silky fabric with an abstract flame-like pattern woven into it, saving it for the "perfect" project. A year ago I decided that was an unhealthy attitude to take towards craft supplies and used it to line a pen case. But, it turns out I still have enough left for the flame motifs on Wen Qing's dress. I didn't have enough left of the darker shade of red that I wanted to use for the skirt, and found myself disappointed by the red fabric offerings at two different fabric stores. Everything was either too bright or too berry (result: for the skirt I'll be layering bright red chiffon over berry red chiffon).

Have not yet decided how to do the edging on the flame patterns. Machine-stitched applique edging is the easiest buuut it's REALLY not the right look. Thinking about how nice it would look beaded but I probably don't have the time. Maybe couched satin cord?

Current Mood: productive

This fic is getting out of hand...

So of the ideas I listed in my last post I ended up going with zombie!jzx and I told myself, I'll just write this as a 1-2k oneshot to sum up the au concept. Hah. Right now it's about 3k and I've told about a third of what I want to tell, and other characters keep knocking on the door of my brain and asking "where am I in this?" (sorry, Mo Xuanyu, it's nowhere good), not to mention Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli keep prolonging the calm-before-the-storm section of the fic by being unbearably sappy.

Well...I'm having fun?

Current Mood: awake

(Last week I posted a new chapter of Butterfly Effect)

I'm about halfway through the next chapter, but I'm already thinking about different fic ideas (this is what happens when I have a lot more time to think than to actually write). Some of the ones that have been the most present in my mind include

a canon-divergent au in which Wei Wuxian brings Jin Zixuan back as a fierce corpse
a space fantasy au (where cultivation in space is a thing, in fact the only thing that allows FTL travel, until Wei Wuxian invents a technological method and throws the galaxy into disarray), probably very self-indulgent and tropey and full of stuff like, being cryogenically frozen for 13 years, and minds being uploaded into spaceships, also the Nies have mechas
canon divergent au where Nie Mingjue loses his core before the sunshot campaign and Nie Huaisang begins acting as sect leader while his brother is still alive
coffin juice au (I call it that because it began life as this (spoilery) shitpost, but then (with input from clockworkspider) it's transformed into a semi-modern archaeologist au with reincarnated Nie Huaisang having confusing dreams about his past life that start taking over his life when an old temple is excavated.

And then yesterday I began writing something that was none of these.

( semi-fic, semi-outline under the cut )

(Coming recently from tumblr, I find myself wishing it was easier to post from my phone. Dreamwidth can handle a lot more formatting options than tumblr, which is good, but hard to navigate on a small screen. Still learning my way around, I guess.)

Current Mood: anxious

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