The parking attendant paused by the double-length bay. Intended for mobile homes and cars with trailers, it was currently occupied by a sleeping dragon.
No parts of it extended beyond the lines, and the paper ticket was clearly displayed, impaled on a horn.
The Temeraire Summer Exchange is back for another year! We're excited to celebrate our small but mighty fandom. This exchange is run on AO3, view the collection profile for all the details and an FAQ, and check out the highlights below:
Schedule:
Sign-Ups Open: May 23 (5pm UTC)
Sign-Ups Close: June 4 (5pm UTC)
Assignments Sent: by June 9 (5pm UTC)
Posting Deadline: August 5 (5pm UTC)
Works Revealed: August 8 (5pm UTC)
Creators Revealed: August 15 (5pm UTC)
How does this work? The first step is signing up. Sign-ups begin May 23. Once they’re open, use the sign-up form in the collection before June 4!
You are required to request and offer a minimum of one character or one pairing. You must also select whether you would like to receive or offer art, fanfic, a photomanip, or any combination.
After sign-ups, the participants will be hand-matched to each other based on what they offered and requested and assignments will go out.
Gifts must be posted to the Temeraire Summer 2026 AO3 collection by August 5. They will appear as anonymous gifts for the recipient. Works will be made available to read on August 8, with creator names still hidden. On August 15, all creators will be revealed.
A note on the tagset and nominations: We are using the same tagset as previous years. As this tagset has grown quite robust, we are foregoing a nominations period. If there is a tag you’d like added, please nominate it in the tagset page or message the mods any time before sign-ups close. Sign-ups do not need to have opened for tag nomination.
What are the minimum requirements for participation? For writers, a fic with a minimum of 500 words. For artists, a nice/cleaned sketch on unlined paper. A photomanip/moodboard should be substantially original. Please use your discretion – and reach out to the mod team if you have questions!
If you have any further questions which aren’t answered here or on the AO3 collection’s FAQ page, please don’t hesitate to reach out! You can send us an ask here, or email [email protected].
Additionally, the Temeraire fandom has an active Discord! Announcements will be posted to Tumblr and Discord concurrently. If you’d like to join, leave a comment or send us an ask or an email and we’ll get you a link.
Please note you will need an AO3 account to participate in the exchange.
i'm not normally one to make jokes about dialect or accent. but the way that British people pronounce "lieutenant" feels like an in-joke i'm not privy to
truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
Temeraire - Appendices, Short Stories and Deleted Scenes or the result of my unplanned crafting weekend.
It turned out much better than I ever thought??? So far I have bound two very simple booklets and a notebook with the help of my sister, so my expectations were not really high tbh.
progress below the cut
I started this project because I was annoyed by the lack of appendices in some editions of the Temeraire books and collected (hopefully) all of them with the help of the Temeraire discord, especially Maz and stargrazing 🧡 I also found some deleted scenes and added the short stories I know of. The typesetting was fun until word decided to fuck with the formatting but that honestly wasn't much of a surprise.
The next step was to print everything out, and then print out the first few pages again, since my sister found way better fonts than I did (thanks!), so I could get close to the Temeraire woodcut covers (though, yes, @nighttimepatrons the T could be mistaken for a J ^^).
After I folded all the sections, I had to think about just how I was actually going to bind this book. Initially I was thinking about something in the style of Japenese bookbinding, though the inner margin would have probably been too small for that. There's a very good youtube channel about bookbinding (called DAS bookbinding) that I went to and though I couldn't find anything about Japanese bookbinding, I found a video about Ethiopian two-needle binding. I decided to go with that since it seemed doable and looks fancy.
The next step was to make the front and back of the book. Luckily (since I'm an incorrigible arts/crafts stuff hoarder) I still had some cardboard notebook backs which came in handy. The question that then came up was what to cover them with. The nicest paper I could find was gift wrapping paper that still made me go meh.
Then, however, I remembered that I'd taken three of the encyclopedia books my parents had thrown out (they are from 1975, slightly outdated, even thought they look very fancy) and kept them (again: arts/crafts stuff hoarder). One of those was the book with maps, because I love maps.
Originally I was going to just use the Great Britain/Ireland map - with Ireland, Wales and England on the front, and Scotland and assorted isles on the back - but my sister (again, thanks!) gave me the idea to put the map upright and cover the rift with the title. Obviously that meant that I needed a new idea for the back and for that I went with a map of the world since Temeraire does travel quite a lot.
Now with all the individual parts assembled, I punched some holes and went to find some yarn. I thought I was going to go with the thin yarn you can see above but that was really way too thin, even when I used three parallel strands. Instead I used embroidery yarn I still had lying around.
Since bookbinding yarn is apparently waxed, I grabbed a beeswax candle and pulled the yarn I used over it. I don't know if it actually did something helpful, but it certainly smelled good.
Ethiopian two-needle bookbinding uses - as the name says - two needles, if you have two holes and two pieces of yarn. I made four holes and so I had four needles and four pieces of yarn.
I guess you could also use just one (or in my case two) pieces of yarn, but if you use two (four) differently coloured pieces of yarn, you'll get a fancy pattern at the spine!
The spine is a lot broader than the front of the book but I can live with that. If I'd made the sections larger, I might have avoided that or it would have been less noticeable at least.
This was a really lovely project that that turned out much better than I could have hoped!!! I powered through this in a weekend+ (started on Friday, finished up Monday morning) and I had a great time :3
Now to wrap this post up, here's a photo of this book with the two booklets I've bound (the short stories are also in the book) and one of it in the shelf with the other Temeraire books:
titsay
romaincrisis
snowghoul
janainaart
discoholicmusic
