#ceruleancynic

What we have here is not just the main fic, or the main series, but also All That You Love (The High Hope Remix) alt pov short fic by byzantienne, and, a detail that I was really excited to include: the initial comment exchange between these two fantastic authors of m the first fic in the series. Did I title that second little book 'all that you meet cute will be carried away' as a silly placeholder? Did I then get super attached and refuse to change it? Uh-

Hell yeah, I refuse to be dignified about any of my favorite hobbies!

But the real secret delight here was that I've been looking for the right opportunity to get weird with boxes. Peller boxes, hinged slipcases, yes, fine, but those are like the box version of my sixfold book adventure. I'm still shooting for some parallel to my fourteenfold book, I'm looking for a way to go completely off the rails. I have some ideas, but it's hard, finding a good large chonk and a small number of equally sized texts, which made a unified and complete set, AND which excited me to work with. That might sound unnecessarily picky, but I swear, there was a good reason for it!

Oh baby. Oh baby.

This worked out so perfectly. I wanted a large book at the center of things. And I wanted two small books oriented in a different direction, placed end to end, at its edge. And I got it! I didn't want to commit too early, and it would have been heartbreaking to fail, but once the big book was together, and the preliminary typesets for the two little books were almost identical? I just HAD to try.

Tumblr is already silencing me and refusing to let me attach as many images as I want, so for this post, let's talk about the main book a little! Cute little quarto bricks are my new FAVORITE favorite thing, as I'm sure you can guess from my archives, and this one was a dream to put together.

It had to be a three-quarter leather binding, naturally. And I was sitting on some gorgeous iridescent maroon paper for endpapers (no photos in this set, it refuses to photograph well, as is the way of pretty iridescent things). I spent some time agonizing over my other material, and whether to use two different marbled patterns, but I went with it in the end. The vibes were distinct enough but the palettes overlapped enough that I really enjoyed the effect. And with the northcott art of marbling fabrics (my beloved) I was able to use lines of symmetry to get some nice fussy cuts for the big book and the little ones. All of the books have leather endbands, matching the spine. And the big book has the big thick faux raised bands I tried out with my last svsss! I don't have enough pictures to show off all the book interiors, but I used this cover plate for the series and main fics within it.

And then, like I showed you above, I put it all together. Marbled paper and silk moire for covering the box, a lot of very tense wrangling of glued-up paper in very small spaces, and, at one point, carefully lowering glue-covered pieces of moire bookcloth down these little pits (walls already covered) using that tab in the front like the world's awkwardest elevator shaft. But the EFFECT!

books read in 2023

— strange practice. by vivian shaw. (@ceruleancynic) ‪★ ★ ★ ★ ★‬

"Don't you think it seems a little... backward, perhaps...to run around committing mortal sins in order to cleanse the world of sin and evil?"

Right now I’m about a third of the way through and Varney the vampyre is having feeeelings while moping about in a too-small borrowed dressing gown, and oh my god:

Shall I never be free of unseemly desire?

this book first came into my consciousness as an idea attached to a person i love enormously, and every idea of this sort that this person has ever had was both solid and entertaining, and i’m sure, although i don’t remember exactly how the conversation went, that i said i couldn’t wait to read it.

of course over several months other people with far more power and influence than your obedient servant here had a similar reaction to it, and pretty soon the book had sold, and i jumped around at least half as much as if it had been my own book, and that time i definitely said i couldn’t wait to read it, knowing that soon i would.

a few months later again, an offer, and a very kind one: did i want to read the complete draft? to which i said of course i fucking did.

for reasons that had nothing at all to do with this book, when it came to me i didn’t read it immediately. until the end of a particularly and memorably horrendous day, about which i needed to stop thinking before i did anything with legal, financial, or medical consequences. and i thought, what i need is a story.

so i sat down, and over the course of two hours or so, i read this book. and i tried to write down everything i thought, because after all isn’t that the best thing you can do for an author, although it simply wasn’t possible after a certain point - i didn’t even notice three of the chapters go by, i was so completely lost in it. and i knew - of course i already knew, but i knew - this book was going to be terrific.

i don’t think it was called that at that point, but the book i was reading would become strange practice. and it’s sitting at my elbow right now, with that white wood and black ink smell of a new book, and vivian shaw printed on the cover which is surreal because that’s my friend viv and this is her book and i just lost two hours during which i looked up maybe three times, even though i’ve already read it, and - 

- look, a lot of people have said this in their reviews, and that’s because it’s true, but strange practice is a thoroughly kind book. its world is not always kind - it’s recognisably the world we live in, and populated with exactly the sort of people we all know - but it is a book that leaves you convinced that there are people out there, fighting the good fight. and maybe you will never know that they are fighting, because they aren’t fighting for you, but they are fighting, and because of them the world - your world, our world - is better.

if you don’t already know what it’s about, here’s the official blurb:

Meet Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead. Dr. Greta Helsing has inherited the family's highly specialized, and highly peculiar, medical practice. She treats the undead for a host of ills - vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights, and entropy in mummies. It's a quiet, supernatural-adjacent life, until a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human and undead Londoners alike. As terror takes hold of the city, Greta must use her unusual skills to stop the cult if she hopes to save her practice, and her life.

surprising nobody who’s been following the consistently spectacular work with which @ceruleancynic has been gifting us all these years, it’s also clever, and funny, and thoughtful, and has moments of genuine heartwrench, and is written in prose that has all the perfectly polished elegance of a silver tea service. it’s just such a satisfying, rich, rewarding read. you will love everyone in it. even - maybe especially - the people you don’t expect to love. (don’t even get me started on stephen and eric. or maybe do. just. augh.) and you will all absolutely adore ruthven.

i really, really, very badly, needed this book when it came to me. and i think right now, maybe, a lot of us need this book.

i suspect, maybe you, my dear readers, need this book. so.

in this economy, if you can afford bread for your soul, you can find it out in the wilds, at most reputable bookstores, i’m sure. i’ve not seen it yet, but i got my copy from the book depository, which does free shipping worldwide and has the benefit of not being amazon. that link will take you right to the book. it seems to be priced around $15-20 depending on whose dollars you’re thinking in.

if you can’t afford it, but you need it, i am giving two copies away! please reblog this post and leave a reply stating that you would like to be entered, and on 25 aug 2017 i will pick two winners by random number generator. i will message those people, and if they have not replied in 24hrs i will pick another. you do not have to be following me, although it’d be nice. you do have to be okay with giving a well-meaning, lawful good, stranger-or-possibly-friend on the internet your mailing address if you win. i will ship anywhere the book depository will (i am so sorry if your country is not on the list but it’s a quite large list!). and all i ask in return is that you drop our @ceruleancynic an ask with your thoughts if you like it.

Have you ever wondered what the literary equivalent was of a modern urban fantasy thriller filmed on a camera nicked from the set of the original Dracula movie?

Well wonder no more!

This book stars something far more enigmatic and far more threatening than the things that go bump in the night- it stars their doctor! Dr. Greta Helsing is the person you go to if you’re a vampire who had too much italian, a mummy whose ankles are ground to dust, or a mysterious ash-grey and immortal man with bronchitis.

Along the way she encounters many mysterious foes:

poison!

intrigue!

lights!

garlic!

contradictions!

irascible patients!

latte art!

depression being called “melancholia”!

public transit systems!

couch surfers!

babies!

and much much more!

Its so good, I simply had to be the first person to make fanart!

Yes, it’s tiny! But if I made it much bigger, you could tell what it was, and that just wouldn’t do! You have to read it first!

Buy it HERE!

so yesterday i got my copy of strange practice and absolutely fucking loved it

so here’s a ruthven because i love my new gay sensible vampire dad