hooksbooks

[hooksbooks]

it is honestly amazing how much of writing and editing is just. logistics. like... do i use a name here or a pronoun? if i move this dialogue tag to the middle of this line and break it in half, does the end of the line hit harder that way? what if i move the tag to the front? what if i remove it entirely? ...wait, whose point of view am i in; can i reasonably say this character is appalled, or must i say they look or seem or sound appalled? is this a deliberate action or a step-removed one; is her hand closing on his shoulder, or is she closing her hand on his shoulder? environment environment environment, we need to break all this dialogue up with some narration, the scene is coming untethered. what! are! they doing! with! the rest of their bodies that are not hands! fuck fuck fuck FUCK i forgot we covered this two chapters ago and now i either need to cut this whole chunk or find a reason to reprise the conversation from earlier. name or pronoun? name or pronoun? name or pronoun? move this clause around in this sentence? oh i'll add this phrase-- nope, never mind, past!me added the same phrase two lines down. okay, if i add too much environmental narration it's going to take away from this bit, but not enough and it won't feel grounded. what if i move this to its own line? where the FUCK are their hands?

[hooksbooks]

Know your insect antennae!

[hooksbooks]

Reth and Hodari. To me <3

[hooksbooks]

— requested by manbunjon

[hooksbooks]

The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there's no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that's used to fill the empty spaces between languages

[hooksbooks]

I love when fanfic authors are freakishly unhinged. "Yes, hello, I am here to write a heart wrenching story about relationships and mortality. My medium is Ducktales (2017)"

[hooksbooks]

Performative feminism is a most annoying aspect of our times.

[hooksbooks]

hi there, just discovered your blog, binged scrolled and consumed all your posts. <3 [ sorry, i don't want to sound weird ] I have a question if you would be so kind to answer? I saw your WIP of Dear Your Holiness, and I am wondering how are you doing your speech-text bubbles? How do you make it look like texts? Is it a software? I am trying to typeset Did you miss me? - Fantismal&Krethes, and let me tell you, that is 80% text-bubbles. And I don't think what i've got going on now is very efficient. Right now i am editing the .css and .html directly in Calibre.

hi! I'm glad you like this blog, nothing weird about it, sorry about the messy house actually and be my guest!!

I really love your ask cause text bubbles are really a pain in the ass and I love babble about my typessets. So I warn you, this answer may be a bit longer than expected. 

The short is: Existing 200k ways to do chat text on writer and more 200k to do on typessets.

Editing the .css and .html directly is my first time seeing it, but I guess it works very well too, just maybe too much time consuming. In general, the most common is pre-setting a paragraph on the software you use to design your project. Most of the softwares for writers can do this. So you can select the dialog, click a button and voilá all your dialogs will look the same and your typesset will be really beautiful really fast.

Affinity and Adobe InDesign I know better, but I know Word does this too, just don't know how. Find one to learn and have joy :)))

My personal response is more like: How do you want your project to look? 

So I think the most important thing to me here is not where to do it, or how to do it fast, but how to do exactly what we want it and what we can do to make this happen. And here lives my lack of sanity. 

It really depends on the project. I have done some fic with chats and none of them I did exactly the same way. But for my Dear Your Holiness project, I want this look of a mobile chat but without remembering any social media chat we know and I want make it fancy

So I try to emulate some things we see on these social media chats and with a bit of compulsory search I discover some things really helpful.

First of all, the typography choice

I'm a little biased here, I love typography. But it is exactly because of this that I notice that chat typography is simple. They need we read fast but without notice, so we don't have serifs, that remember us of academic texts, and the contrast are really light

I had this other typesser of Wish You Are Here by @afieryfox, and she uses Discord and Twitter to set her fic, in this case I choose the exact fonts that each platform uses to set my typesset (and setting a paragraph for each site). But in the main text I use some simple serifed font, to help the reading.

Main Text: Cambria

Discord: Whitney

Twitter/X : Helvetica Neue

The same to DYH, I chose a serif font with some fancy look to the body and a saint serif font to the text, but I chose one with some alike things to do not look too drastic.

I chose to set the main text in OldStyle because it has this vintage look., and the chats on Made infinit (this one I ask permission for personal use). They pretty similar except for the g, so i think work very well

The second was the contrast. 

We had this constant that is the color of the chats, where who sends the text is the most eye-catching bubble, and the right one. So I just set this with the pov one being our dramatic bubble. In this case, our Padfoot

And the last thing, our guides and spaces!!

We are not on a mobile, so we have pretty much space and this is a problem, because chat texts are compacts and a book… not exactly. So what i did was divide the space I had to rearrange our text so we can feel like the space was purposeful

I divide my workspace in 3, and each side of the chat could only transpose ⅔. then they has their own section and don’t steal the friend's space.

this is not extremely strict, the text can transpass the line till I feel like is acceptable. So, if the text is too long and insist on cross the guide, i can shift then and make these big balloons

Other guides I like:

the space between the start of the text end the start of the bubble

the space between bubbles

the center of the text on inside de bubble

the last bubble with the call tail (idk how call this)

So

How I did my Dear Your Holiness chat bubbles?

I did all the typesset first.

I use Adobe Indesign to do my typessets, so I set up all the text blocks, with all the typos to set my pre-sert paragraphs. All my paragraphs are pre-settings cause I like my life easy when I can have it, cause the rest of the process is really time-consuming.

So set all the pre-set paragraphs and the dialogues exactly the way I want it. Till look something like this 

So I take a simple print from the naked page and go to Adobe Illustrator, were I put the the cute little outfit (the bubble)

There I have a board setting on my page size to use the correct scale on the bubbles, I just scale the print on the board and fit the bubbles on the dialogues. 

The bubbles are actually little rectangles with rounded corners. We can easily do the call tail (still don't know how call this thing) just push one off the corners staring, but I really wanted this sexy toothpaste curve, so I make this little shape and overlapped my bubble.

To put the bubbles over the print, i set the opacity on 80% or less just to confirm the guides and the * I left to mark the ones that will be big balloons. So I correct the opacity, remove the print and save as a pdf

the pdf I put above my text, and change the color of Sirius’s chat, because we can’t read black on black and voíla, -1 page to do.

Now all we need is repeat till end all dialogues bubbles left in the fic. 

After some time this became a really mechanical thing, so listen to something in that maintime that the time flies. So yes, a pain in the ass as i said, but look how pretty they turn!!!!

yeah, I think that's it

I hope I've answered

[hooksbooks]

[hooksbooks]

I want to be reading fanfic, not writing it. Unfortunately, I want to be reading very specific fanfic which I will in fact first have to write.

[hooksbooks]

Highlights of the sweaters i made in 2024

(I kint these on twitch, same username as here :3)

[hooksbooks]

Here’s what the back of a reversible full-sized moth shaped jumper looks like.

[hooksbooks]

someone on twitter is trying to claim that use of an em-dash is an indication of AI-generated writing because it’s “relatively rare” for actual humans to use it. skill issue

[hooksbooks]

I think people forget that Consensual Non Consent isn't always ropes and force. It can be cute and sweet and functional like any kink.

Fun fact about me: I am highly averse to the sensation of water on my skin. I am autistic and it is a sensory nightmare that I can't describe.

And in the last few years as both personal and global circumstances have worsened, my ability to tolerate it has severely declined and I became detrimentally avoidant of showers.

To the point where, my partner and I decided (I asked him and he agreed) that he would assume control of my showing habits. He would tell me when shower day would be, and he'd get in there with me, to help me through it and make sure I actually did it.

It is very much a CNC situation. I literally whimper and beg him not to make me do it. And I also have a safe word in case I really can't do it.

This system has improved my general well being dramatically. I literally just cannot force myself to endure the extraordinary discomfort.

But he can. And then he cradles my head on his chest as I whimper and occasionally actually cry during the first few minutes when my nervous system goes the most haywire.

We usually do not have sex. We're very touchy people so there is a lot of cuddling and a little groping, but that's not the central point and it very rarely ever results in any kind of prolonged sexual activities.

Because kink is not just about sex. Kink can be accommodating. Even the "scary" kinks like CNC

[hooksbooks]

The O in ABO is for Opera Ghost

Now that the author has received it, I can show off this bind! The Phantom of the Opera is a fandom I enjoy, but I don't check in on it very often. Recently I checked in and found that @kotaka-kun had written a bunch of ABO one-shots and drabbles where Erik is an omega and Christine is an alpha. Which, hello, didn't know I needed THAT in my life but YES PLEASE. Female alpha with male omega? Absolute favorite. Erik who is absolutely worshipful of Christine but still socially awkward? Love it. Possessive Christine going "See this weirdo? This is MY weirdo, no one gets to say bad things about him. No, not even you, Erik" like a boss? The most fabulous. So, anyway, I read all their stories and decided that I really needed a physical copy of these ASAP (and then read them all again for good measure).

In a completely unrelated event in the same week, I was introduced to the dwarsligger format of books, which has its text arranged parallel to the spine so that to read the book, the spine is held horizontal instead of vertical. Like a flip-phone, for us olds.

[ID: A dwarsligger book, held open. It has a top page and a bottom page rather than a left page and right page, as the spine is parallel to the lines of text. The whole thing is about the size of a hand. /End ID]

I thought this format of book would be PERFECT for these stories, as they gave me very "it's not like other people do it, but that doesn't mean it's wrong" vibes, which I feel this format of book reflects perfectly. New, different, maybe a little unnerving, but also a little intriguing at the same time.

I format my textblocks in MS Word, and it was tricky to arrange things into a "top" and "bottom" instead of the more regular verso and recto (left and right), but the WORST part was getting the page numbers to work correctly. Because the page numbers are only displayed on the bottom pages but Word has the top and the bottom as different pages, it wanted to put the page numbers as 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. I had to go digging real deep in the MS Word niche features to figure it out. I ended up finding the information I needed on a nearly-20-year-old blog that kept referring to Word 2007 as "new Word". Whenever you need really precise, niche information, it's always on a 20-year-old blog, they're the best source of knowledge. If anyone's curious, I ended up having to do some math in the page number field codes so the displayed page number was always half of the actual page number + 1 (using integer division). So 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. became 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Unfortunately the Table of Contents field codes are a black box and don't let you edit the internals, so I had to generate the table of contents (which displayed the actual page numbers instead of the displayed page numbers) and then edit all the numbers myself.

On the bright side, this format and size of book (it's an octavo, so one-eighth of a letter-size sheet of paper) is PERFECT for a drabble collection. A title, plus 100 words, plus a page number, exactly fits on one top-and-bottom spread.

I of course made myself a copy as well as an author copy. However, there were...issues.

[ID: A black and brown copy of the same book lying on a cutting mat, front covers up. They're both titled "The O in ABO stands for Opera Ghost" with the text arranged parallel to the spine, but the brown copy is noticeably narrower and the title barely fits on the cover. /End ID]

When I trimmed my copy, I measured wrong (or rather, measured right but in the wrong place) and trimmed the right side twice. Luckily I had left large enough margins that I didn't trim off any text. I'll just trim the left side by the same amount and I'll just have tiny margins on my copy, no problem, right? Wrong. I immediately proceeded to cut off all my kettle stitches on the left side.

[ID: A hand holding a dwarsligger book open with a thumb under the stitching in the middle of a signature, showing that the knots securing the stitching have been completely cut off on the left side. /End ID]

Luckily the stitching is secured at three other points and I glued the spine well, but it was still a face-palm moment.

Technical details:

Size: Letter-octavo dwarsligger

No headbands on this one (intended to, forgot until I glued the oxford hollow on, at which point it was too late)

Rounded but not backed

Chisel-trimmed

Things I especially liked about this bind:

The format! So weird, so delightful

Things I would improve next time:

Not cutting my stitching off, ideally.

Overall, I love the stories and like the bind. (I also read all the stories through again once I had the finished bind in my hands. Still loved them.) It works, it's functional, it would have been better if I hadn't trimmed my copy way too narrow, but live and learn and it still works so it's fine.

[hooksbooks]

It was so fun to make! I found out about this style of book (called a dwarsligger) and found and read all your Phantom ABO one-shots within a couple days of each other, and I thought they fit each other perfectly.

When @hooksbooks reached out to me about binding my omegaverse PotO fics and sending me a copy, I was so deeply moved by the thought of someone liking my fics enough to want to put in the time and energy to go through them, put them in a chronological order (that I myself didn't even intend for there to be, what with how many oneshots I wrote), and make it into a book...

And now to get to hold it in my hands? It feels so surreal, and in the best way.

I'm especially obsessed with the way they went along with my "it's not how most people do it, but that doesn't mean it's wrong" theme, and bound it with the spine on the top.

This was such a novel (pun intended) experience from top to bottom, and I'm so grateful 🩷🩷🩷

Thank you again @hooksbooks !!!

[hooksbooks]

Bodyswap!snarry, my beloved…

Two fools with low self esteem being forced to see themselves from another perspective, falling in love with each other in themselves. Lovely. Wonderful. Beautiful. And let’s not forget, UNDERRATED.