#pamphlet bind

with art by @isolabellz

This story is truly one of the most unique fics I have ever read! It is an absolute masterclass in temporal storytelling where one point of view moves forward in time while the other moves backwards...

In this fic Ilya and Shane spend four months playing hockey in Switzerland during an NHL lockout, suddenly sharing not only a hockey team but also a house, routines, a life. And then abruptly need to return to their separate realities.

Already while reading I knew that I absolutely wanted to bind this story and immediately envisioned a Switzerland-focused cover design. Which was further inspired by the Swiss flag mug that Shane remembers as one of the things he collected while living in Zürich.

And then luckily I stumbled across the absolutely gorgeous and special art that @isolabellz created for the fic - look at those Zürich skyline vibes and the whole NYE scene comic, I mean.... Thank you so, so much for letting me use your pieces!

I really like that not having a Cricut or the option to print on canvas always challenges me to get creative with my covers - this time I chose to use stickers for the title which mirror the block font of the typeset and the cutout made it possible to still show the art on the cover.

Anon author, wherever you are - thank you for this absolute masterpiece that will stay with me for a long time!! [and also thank you for inspiring me to get out of my binding hibernation and motivating me to make my second ever typeset]

I'm declaring it the week of the pamphlet bind, because this is the second of three I've got in my backlogged queue of fanbinds to share.

Sometimes, a vaguely ridiculous idea gets ahold of you and won't let go.

When I discovered that there were not one, but TWO short MDZS modern AU fic with the incredibly specific meet-cute premise of "character A encounters a swarm of bees, and character B is the beekeeper who rescues them," I decided I needed to bind them. Together. And they were both short, so a quick pamphlet bind was the perfect solution.

I think I did this two summers ago, and would probably do a bit better with the text placement on the cover now, but I stand behind all the bee theming in the typeset unreservedly.

There must be something about the Twin Jades of Lan that not one, but TWO authors looked at them and said, you know what? Beekeeper.

So here we have, both with awesome titles, Save the Bees (Ride a Beekeeper) by @ariaste and Covered in Bees by @scarlettohairdye.

Public domain images, cardstock cover, sewn with some orange crochet cotton, because god knows I have enough random thread around. To make up for the disreputable cookie sheet used for an atmospheric industrial space background in my last post, this one is photographed on the orange and yellow stripes of a rainbow plain-weave tablerunner I wove out of the accumulated scrap basket at the weavers' guild.

Recurrence by Torch is part of my ongoing goal to bind at least a few works from the fandoms I've been in over the years. I will fully admit I was just kind of along for the ride in Star Wars prequel series fandom, back when The Phantom Menace came out. A good friend at the time fell hard for it, I have a general fondness and nostalgia for the original series, and it was one of the big slash ships of the day (by which I mean m/m slash, not horror slash) and everyone was writing it. It was a fun band wagon to jump on!

But this is not a fun fic.

The author's notes for this short series reads: "This is not a nice story. In fact, it's probably the least nice story I've ever written."

And it's precisely because it's not a nice story, and is a unflinching, horrible refutation to moral absolutism that it's stuck with me for more than twenty years. It fits into the genre of darkfic, and I think is well worth preserving as a piece of fandom history.

The series notes read "This is not a nice series. It deals with issues of abuse: abuse of trust, abuse of power, the sexual coercion of a very young person by a much older person, and the cyclic nature of bad choices. Please proceed with caution."

The total series is just under 6k words, and I've done a pamphlet bind for it, with a cardstock cover. The cover is lined with gel-plate printed acrylic paint on tissue (because I raided my wife's art stash again), and the cover image is a historical astronomy illustration smashed through some filters and flipped into a negative image. (Look, I CAN use GIMP, an open-source Photoshop alternative, I just never claimed to have any expertise or finess with it. My level of use is "oh, what does this menu do?" ninety percent of the time.)

This was actually one of my earlier fan binds, in April 2022. But I'd just bound and shared two X-Files fic also by torch, and decided to post a few other things in between... and then it languished in my drafts for, uh, two and a bit years.

Fun (slightly embarrassing) fact, the background for the photos is a much-abused cookie sheet that I really should replace one of these days.