#loquaciousquark

Mango Lavellan

Queen of Wands

"She was still walking the same path that they’d journeyed together for a while. She might not know whether she would ever see the end of this path, whether he’d ever find his way back, but she’d keep walking nonetheless. Even if he never returned, even if she never loved another like this, even if she did. It might be harder, it might take longer, the loneliness might burn; none of that had ever held her back before."

A tarot card for @bettydice from @loquaciousquark, with a quote written by bettydice from one of Mango's stories. ♥

If you'd like a card like this, consider checking out my forms link:

Written for @loquaciousquark on the occasion of her birthday! Since your in-person gifts will be a little late, I figured this one should be a little early. Apologies for the sparse Astarion content - this one got away from me a bit!

Title: Une fleur entre deux abîmes

Fandom: MASH/Baldur's Gate 3 (yes, really)

Characters: Charles Emerson Winchester III, ensembles of both casts

Rating: T

Summary: The pod disgorges him as though he were something dreamt up by the sadists at the mess tent, and Charles Emerson Winchester III falls to his knees onto the floor of what is inarguably some manner of alien spacecraft.

I did it! My very first finished fanfic binding is finally done!! 

I learned a ton from making this, especially about how to seal the paper part of the cover and using toner-reactive foil for the cover art. 

The fic is the wonderful Larkspur Be Winter Sown by @loquaciousquark. It’s 21,780 words long, which came out to a nice and tiny 70ish pages total. I wanted to do a shorter fic for my first time going through the entire process because it felt less intimidating than a longer one, but I’m not sure the size actually mattered much to the difficulty in the end. 

I have one other text block that’s ready to have its cover made (the Opus one I showed a while back) and I have a few others I’m planning to do immediately, now that I have a good grasp on the whole process. My favorite part of this one has to be the endpaper I made for it - it’s just construction paper, but I printed a little black snowflake damask pattern I found for it and I absolutely love how it looks. It’s even more subtle in person because it’s just black-on-black. 

The cover varnish was absolute hell to figure out - I tried so many different sealing methods before ending up on a clear gloss Rustoleum varnish that wasn’t even meant for paper, but I’m happy with the end product and have some good lessons learned to make the next one easier and better. 

I really appreciate this. Thank you for the note. <3

It sucks. There's probably something more eloquent I could say, but it just...sucks.

It's so surreal to have your own world rocked and then watch the rest of the world just...continue like everything is normal. And you have to keep doing normal things. I'll think of something and burst into tears at my keyboard while writing up text for a proposal and answering an email from a coworker. Such a bizarre liminal space to be in.

I've lost people in my life, but never one with such a strong digital footprint. It's a gift in a lot of ways. I can read back through her blog. I can scroll back through Discord. I can listen to her Spotify music, read her fic. I'm so grateful I liveblogged a lot of multiplayer adventures, because some of those shenanigans are still there for me to look back on. But right now I'm just so fucking sad that her digital spaces are now a memorial to her, not something living and breathing and changing and...continuing.