#Should've probably made this an actual text format lmao

[wakinguponsaturday]

Almost a year to the day after first asking @its-sixxers if I could print out and bind Half Light (after figuring out how one actually does that), I've finally finished it!!!

She's 825 pages long, has some of the early pages warped from glue, and blood (?) staining the text block, and I am so excited to fall in love with Nines and Mary all over again. Thanks for letting me do this, it's been a really rewarding project and I got a new hobby out of it!!!

Please go read Half Light and everything else Six has written, she is immensely talented. Mary is my favourite character in Bloodlines bar none and reading her story endeared me to VTMB when the game itself did not. Six's Fallout works are also masterpieces, and I haven't checked out her newer stuff with Elder Scrolls but I fully intend to because even if I've never touched a Skyrim game in my life, I know I'm going to adore it too!

More info about the process under the cut.

SeaLemon was an invaluable resource starting out here because I barely know how to sew and I had no idea how to approach the actual construction of a book. I'm gonna plug her right off the bat because she's very beginner-friendly if anyone else wants to learn.

But before all of that I had to format everything in Word! Chapter by chapter I copied the text over from the downloadable PDF from AO3 and would scan through the fic to ensure the formatting was correct (italicization, bolding, paragraph breaks, etc). I'd do this for about an hour at a time over the course of a couple months, until I decided to do the rest of it all at once after one March night at 10PM where I decided to learn how to bind it all, because fuck it, why not. (Answer: I was freaked out about my upcoming departmental talk and this seemed like a good distraction).

Printing all of it just on regular printer paper (don't know if I'd do that again in the future, but it's what I had on hand) it ended up being 52 signatures, or collections of 16 pages (4 pieces of paper) folded in half. Pierced holes in all of those using an awl and an old phonebook to hold the pages open, and then used my old embroidery thread to sew them together. This part took me maybe two days because I was just so damn pumped about it lmao. I also don't have any kind of bookpress to weight down the pages, so I had made due with old textbooks and MCAT prep material.

It stayed this way for LITERAL MONTHS as I gathered all the other supplies - chipboard and brushes from my local craft store, PVA glue online, and by far the hardest part was fabric. I've since learned that you can make your own fabric using book cloth and basically anything you want (if I had known this book would have been coated in red silk I swear) but for now I just wanted to be sure it was something designed for this purpose, as the woman at Fabric Land assured me it needed something specialized. So binder's buckram! Took a while to find something local and the color selection was pretty limited, I was hoping for a dark red or a dark blue but the green was the best they had in stock. Took even longer to get here. And by that point I had enough going on that it fell by the wayside until uh.... last week.

I glued the spine, again realizing that maybe I should've just made my own bookpress but powering through with textbooks to hold things in place, and let that sit for a couple days to fully dry. Ideally it would be flat, but beggars cannot be choosers. Gave her a lil ribbon too.

Not pictured because I forgot, the final text block with black construction paper glued to it to form the inside cover (would probably use something thicker/crisper in the future, something more like cardstock perhaps?). But then it came to putting the cover together! And that was just cutting chipboard to fit and gluing it correctly onto the fabric, leaving gaps around the spine.

Let that dry, and then I glued the text block in and let everything sit for just over 24h, again with makeshift weights to prevent the fabric warping (it's the second book from the bottom).

And then tada! Finished book! (This one's from before it was pressed but it looks the same now)

All in all extremely cool to hold in my hands and I look forward to the next fic that makes me this insane. If I get permission to do The Sun Is Now Fading I might take a crack at that and make a little set! Follow your dreams and one day you too will be able to take notes in the margins of your favourite Vampire the Masquerade fic.