Thanks to @chthonion and the awesome Your shadow rising up to meet you series, i have finally started a brand new hobby : book binding. After having gotten permission from our lovely author, i decided to be ambitious and print and bind an illustrated edition of the completed story "Anastasis". Through my two month long attempt to do this, i have learned the following : 1. I absolutly and utterly suck at art. 2. I am however perfectly capable of playing jigsaw with other people art and by that get original-looking and decent art. 3. Doing things the right way sucks : in order to play jigsaw with other people art, i looked for beautiful art, and in order to do things right, tracked down the artist, created account on brand new plateform and asked permission to use their art. Of the 15 artist i contacted to see if i could jigsaw their art to make something new, i got one positive answer, got blocked by five of them immediatly, and the rest just didn't answer... 4. Ai art is hard: after having utterly failed to get enough permission to jigsaw pretty art, i discovered ai art and endeavored to get enough pretty ai art to jigsaw into original art, after a month of battling free ai image generation and editing website, i had enough image to jigsaw into art. Which i did, i finally got ten illustrations, one for each chapter and two illustration for my endpages. 5. Typesetting is hard : now that i had the art, time to print the book, except no, book downloaded from ao3 can't immediatly be printed, they have to be edited, and then printed, you must have the right margin and the right order for printing, cue another month of battling with word in order to finally have something i can print. 6. Dimensions exist : my typesetting ready, my illustration ready, i prepared to add my illustration to the typeset and then i noticed that my endpaper dimensions didn't fit with my typeset, it was too long and not wide enough, so i had to figure out a way to adapt it... 7. Printing is also hard : the first time i printed the book, i noticed that my typesetting was off.... and had to return, rework it and then print it. I then noticed that i hadn't actually printed the whole of it, just part of it, cue another round of printing... 8. Gluing is hard : i printed both the book and the endpaper on standard copypaper, because that was what i had, predictably, when i tried to glue my endpaper on the cover and on the book, both the book last and first page, as well as my endpapers ended up warping so much i had to restart eveything, this time i still printed the book with copypaper but made sure to use thick (200mg) paper for the endpaper and to add thick paper between the book and the endpaper so it doesn't warp with the glue. 9. writing in a straight line is hard : i decided to use gliding foil to write the book title on the cover and ended up writing it in diagonal.... 10. It was absolutly worth it : i wasted so much material, ended up tacking three months, but it was sooo much fun and i'm so glad i've got a physical version of the book now. I joined pics, it ain't the prettiest but i'm soooo pround.
