My dear friend @nottodaylogic is working on a bind of the AMAZING fic The Wammy Verdict by @solarspectrums ! I drew these endpages referencing L’s dream and the kiss at the creek <3
For the 2025 Renegade Typeset Exchange, I typeset the Voltron: Legendary Defender fic Call Me, Beep Me, for @starstreampress, and bound a copy for myself as a prototype to proof it.
(Cover art by Potatical and Thefrieslord, endpages from the Amino VLD community.)
Don't let this book's relatively classic outside appearance fool you; this is in truth the weirdest project I've done, by far.
It was a love project: not so much for the fandom in itself (which I knew nothing about when I went into the exchange), but for absolute nerdism, fandom preservation and archiving. and most of all, silly complexity in typesetting. It's not fun if it's easy, right?
My usual typesets take me between half a day and a week, depending on their length, complexity, and the level of nitpicking I have the energy to put into them.
This typeset took me a month and a half, a lot of braincells, and more patience than I have.
Also, it took 9372 Excel lines with a hint of macros on top.
Because, you know. Which software better than Excel of all things to typeset a 85k word fanfiction, right?
Have some photos of the typeset:
And beneath the cut, here's a full rundown of my slow descent into madness, along with more photos and details. Buckle up; we're in for a long long ride.
Step 1: Researching
When I signed up for the exchange, I agreed that I was happy to bind fandom-blind. I'm always up for new discoveries!
Since I love Wrong Number AUs, Call Me Beep Me seemed right up my alley, even without knowing the source material. It was a fun read, and it would probably have stayed as such if not for two things:
1. These characters send a lot of photos to each other
2. A lot of art was drawn for this story.
Behold: a rabbit hole!
It may be orphaned now, but Call Me, Beep Me remains the most kudosed VLD fic on AO3 even today. It is monumental to the fandom enough to even have a Fanlore page! As such, it's no surprise that the story has plenty of fanarts. Neither is it a surprise that, in the almost 10 years since the fanfic was posted, many contributing artists went missing from the net, deleted their works or their accounts.
People grow and change and don't especially want to be associated with some of their past works. Orphaned stories, deleted blogs: these are just your regular fandom heartbreaks.
It was still quite painful to realise that of the almost 50 links listed at the end of the work, more than half were broken or sent to deleted pages/accounts. I don't deal well with things disappearing when they were just there and their trace is still here, and I'm frankly awful at letting go. This led me to a day-long research of the lost art. The Wayback machine came handy. The way Tumblr works also allowed to track down some of the deleted art. And, absolute plot twist, Pinterest (!), land of stolen art and dubious sources, actually helped with retracing the steps of the lost art. By the end of a somewhat-tiring day, my project folder was richer with almost 50 fanarts.
Except... things couldn't be too easy. I knew it would be touchy, but I somehow still hanged onto the hope that maybe I could chat with some of the artists.
I couldn't.
Which kind of sucked, because I needed their permission to include their art in the typeset that would be shared with the Renegade Bindery community.
I preciously kept the lost art, and scrapped my plans. Of all the photos the characters sent each other in the story, none would be the fanarts I'd exhumed. I still needed images, though, so I spent hours using my Shutterstock account to find generic photos that would work with the story. I've never browsed so many cat photos in such a short time. It was nice.
This was all good and well, but some of the photos in the story included the characters themselves. And, well. You won't find them on Shutterstock.
So I had to rely on the next thing I could use without specific permission: screenshots. The great internet is fantastic for screenshots! But it doesn't cover everything. So I looked up for clips of the episodes, so I could make the screenshots myself according to the needs of the story.
And obviously... well, try watching out-of-context scenes for hours, with only a vague idea of the characters that you formed by reading an AU. Guess what? I grew intrigued. Of course I did. So I went back to my beloved Internet Archive, that picked up where Netflix (shamefully) left off, and...
well
I watched Voltron. All 8 seasons.
I know, we are all very surprised it ended like this
We are still on my bindery blog so I won't go further in-depth about it: in spite of the length and details I'm walking you through, I'm still describing parts of the whole process of fankbinding. Don't say you weren't warned: I did open this post by saying this was a weird project!
(Note: if you're really invested in what I thought of VLD, you can ask me at @lia404. Let's keep the fanmess where it should be; that is, on my main.)
And with all that, I was done with Step 1: the Researching part of the project. After a few weeks, I knew more about a fandom and its material, about how the AU met with canon, about what the characters look like, how they behave, and what sort of photos they would send.
I had all the knowledge I needed to hopefully make coherent visual choices. I had a folder filled with recovered art that wouldn't end in the typeset, and a folder filled with Shutterstock photos and screenshots that would be part of the typeset.
Time to move to...
Step 2: How To Typeset Your Textfic (worst choices only!)
It goes without saying, I had never typeset textfics before this one. If I had, I don't think I would have picked Call Me, Beep Me for the exchange :')
I had already a template of formatting for text messages that I'd made for another typeset some time ago, and with it began the experimentations.
My main questions were: does it print well? Are the colours fitting? How busy does it look on the page? Would I read a full book like this?
Easy to answer: colour-wise, it printed rather well, it fitted the characters (now that I knew them), and I'd probably have needed so much toner to print 85k words of this that I could already begin filing for bankruptcy.
My template was lovely for short, in story-messages. Not for a story almost entirely made of messages.
So I tried again:
Fewer colours seemed more reasonable. I liked the format, too; I had this idea of doing a weirdly sized book, slightly elongated as if it were a smartphone. After some more thinking, I had to accept that while it could work for a 15-to-20k story, 85k was way too long to fit the "fun-sized book" aesthetic.
I still needed to make it more simple, so I removed the phone lines.
I was almost there; actually, that was good enough for me for a start, even if some fine-tuning would be unavoidable.
Having decided of the shape of the typeset, I realised that since it's quite different from the original story, I would have to make toher choices—and some that might impact the storytelling a little, so I had to do it intelligently.
On AO3, the author differenciates characters by changing the font between messages. They give the key at the beginning of each chapter:
Sadly, this doesn't translate really well on printed pages, and I already had my format in mind. The differenciation between characters would be through colours, and the formatting added an element: we'd read directly from the characters' phones.
This is when I realised the impact it could have on the story. Choosing to show the messages through the phone of a character was basically choosing the point of view the conversation would be read from. This was not only merely visual; it was storytelling. I had to ensure the choices were coherent.
A few examples:
When Keith messes up and accidentally sends a message to Shiro instead of Pidge, it felt important to keep the reader confused too. The formatting I'd planned for the typeset ruined the initial effect conveyed by the author's formatting on AO3, but I could still toy around with my own idea.
Instead of having Keith send the messages from his phone (which would immediately display the name of the character receiving the message, and thus ruin the effect of surprise of the recipient), I switched the point of view to Shiro then Pidge. This way, it's obvious that Keith is writing, but the recipient (from whose phone we're reading) is not as obvious just yet.
When Lance decides to give a stupid name to Keith in his contacts, or when he changes his contact photo, his phone needed to display it. And Lance has the occasion to do it a lot throughout the story.
These are obviously additions that were not part of the initial way the story was written, but that I couldn't avoid with the formatting I wanted to do. Might as well make them fun!
Receiving calls. While in Call Me, Beep Me, calls may be the only hint we have at whose point of view we're reading from, I still needed to find a way to display them in believable phone-way, and make them as impactful.
(I can't believe it but these screenshots just made me realise that there still are typesetting errors page 292. I will never be free.)
Playing with timestamps. One of the things I really admire with Call Me, Beep Me, is the author's consistency when it comes to using timestamps. In the whole 85k words of the story, I think I caught only 3 timestamp mistakes. All the timestamps are quite believable in the delay between each message, and while it's easy to disregard them when reading, it's super fun to notice the implications when you pay attention.
I thought that I'd put all the timestamps at the side of their respective messages, like the author does in the fic, but after pondering, I also decided to push the "messaging app" feel by adding this date-and-time stamp that appears after a pause in the conversation. I didn't have a clear rule for that, but I opted to add these stamps for breaks in conversation that lasted more than 5-10 minutes. It may seem a little short, but these characters chat A LOT, and 5-10mn breaks in a conversation actually doesn't happen that often.
Now that you've seen examples of AO3-to-typeset translation, let's rewind a little to the part where I was deciding on how to do my formatting. Basically, the center point of it was that while the original story was written with vague point of views, my typeset needed "actual point of views" in the form of whose phone we were reading the story from. Which could only mean one thing.
I needed to do a first print and re-read the fic.
Colour-coded, of course, because what are we? Animals? The first colour is the phone we're reading from. The second colour is the person sending the messages to this phone. The name written in full letters with a pen is the display name of the sender.
Once this was done, I finally had everything I needed: a good idea of what my formatting would look like, all the images I needed to embed in the text, and the key elements to shape everything together with timestamps and point of view. Now, it was only a matter of putting everything together. Easy enough, right?
...
...right?
As Tumblr refuses that I put more than 30 images in a post, I'm going to take a break here before we move on to the next part of typesetting hell; the one that most people I talked with were interested in; my walking nightmare for weeks and weeks; the part where I actually started using a software to typeset, with a deadline on sight.
So quite obviously, no, putting all the elements together into a cohesive typeset wasn't 'easy enough.' It turns out that having a good idea of the result doesn't mean having shortcuts to reach the goal!
I knooooow, we are all very surprised again. (also maybe I like this reaction pic)
This second part is, once more, pretty long. You'll find my slow descent into Excel madness under the cut!
As a reminder: I was trying to go from what was on AO3 (on the left) to what I wanted to print (on the right.)
The first issue I had were the timestamps. As I already mentioned, timestamps in Call Me, Beep Me are really part of the storytelling: there was no omitting them. I had to figure out how to tidy the text and isolate the timestamps from the lines. I probably could have done a Word macro or something, but the truth is, I'm not really comfortable with Word.
What I am comfortable with, though, is (you've got it by now) Excel.
I am, however, not comfortable with the English terminology of Excel, so please bear with me as I try to be as clear as possible while most likely using the wrong words.
I downloaded the html file from AO3, isolated the text parts, and made a csv with it. Then, using data convert, I split it using "(" and ")" as dividers, since the original timestamps were between parentheses.
This didn't take long (yay automated things!) but actually helped a lot in seeing things clearer. I decided to set aside the timestamps in a hidden sheet called Data, so I could call them from the chapter sheets, rather than having to copy/paste them.
With the timestamps all set, I moved to the actual first tedious part of typesetting: splitting texts in two columns depending on whether the message was sent or received.
Contrary to timestamps, I couldn't find a way to automate it. Which means... I did it manually, through re-reading the story. I took this opportunity to also add lines for the contact names and the dates. It also allowed me to catch some time stamps, typos and formatting mistakes, and to review the images I needed to include in the story... a fruitful third reading.
Once done, I added back the timestamps. Since I had decided to show the timestamp on the left for the received messages and on the right for the sent ones, I just had to create a macro saying "if the column B is filled, show timestamp in 1; if the column C is filled, show timestamp in D". Pretty straightforward, which was refreshing after the previous step!
Once exported to pdf, things were starting to look good:
At this point, I thought I'd export everything to a Word document and then tidy the tables and ensure everything was working if printed in Letter. (I only use A4!)
Except... I was growing frustrated with the fact that I couldn't have columns overlap. This created very small lines which, once printed, were really uncomfortable to read. Word could allow to extend one line, shorten another... if I did it by hand, line by line.
I had already read the story three times. I did not want to do line by line. Word did not have a way to automate it that I could think of. I tried! This is when I looked into Word macros, but, again: I barely know anything about them, and I didn't have time to train.
I lost several hours on Word, testing stuff. Then I realised that even just importing all the tables in a Word document wasn't that easy, and editing the tables or resizing them properly was a headache.
By then, I was not "growing frustrated". I was just pissed off. WHY is it so hard to make Word and Excel work together when they are part of the SAME SUITE?
Nothing like a good Microsoft-induced headache to make you want to burn the world down.
(This post may or may not be a great excuse to share the ugly screenshots I loved taking while browsing through the episodes. This is art.)
Anyway, after passing through all the stages of grief, I accepted that my fate was sealed: I would not use Excel as a mere tool to pre-format the story I'd then paste in Word. I was going to do the full thing on Excel.
Since I had given up any pretense of being normal about it, I made myself a damn process to follow chapter after chapter so I would not forget any step.
I ended up creating another macro to simulate the overlap I was aiming for. Instead of two columns, my page was made of three columns: the left one for received messages, the right one for sent messages, and the middle for the overlap. The macro would merge the middle column with the other one that was filled on the line. I felt very clever when designing it, but had a few accidents before I managed to make it work.
I also spectacularly failed at creating another macro that would automatically format the height of cells according to the amount of text in them. Did you know that there was no way to automatise it for merged cells?
Now you know.
Ugh
In a different Excel file, I made myself assets that I could simply copy/paste for contact cards and calls. I used official profile images for the characters' contact photos, and Shutterstock/screenshots for Keith and Lance according to the story.
While adjusting the height of cells by hand (💀), I integrated these assets in the typeset. In hindsight, I could have done the integration with another macro, but since I was doing the height adjustment anyway...
And after a (long) while, lo and behold!
You'd think that by this point, I'd be almost done. Well, that's what I thought, EXCEPT. I still needed to export my files in a usable way.
I set my page size as A6 (since half-letter was not available for me), so that the size would be displayed with the tiny dotted lines you can see on the screenshot above. This allowed to make sure that there would be no orphaned word or line. Then, I printed each chapter as pdf (and died a little inside because, seriously, there must have been a better way.) I joined all pdfs together and opened them in Affinity Publisher to fix the page sizing and deal with the narration.
My laptop is a REALLY good laptop. Processor i7, 16GB RAM, I love my laptop. It's also more than 10 years old. When I put all pdfs together to edit them, I lost myself in meditation so I would not burst a vessel when everything would eventually crash.
It took 3 attempts, but I joined everything and opened everything and my laptop did not crash.
I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised. Things looked good in Affinity. I was possibly seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!
On my new Affinity Publisher file, I set the correct paper size, displayed pages in spreads, and added page numbers before doing a test print. Everything was looking so good!
...except.
I came across an interesting error when printing.
Yup, apparently, Affinity tends to "adjust" the alignment of text according to the side of the spread it's on. Half of my text was swapped to the right. Everytime I tried to fix it, it went back on the wrong side as soon as I clicked away.
I haven't managed to figure out why it behaved like this precisely, or even to reproduce the error since. I just knew that if I wanted my spreads, I'd have to fix it possibly by hand.
Uuurghhh
FINE.
It would have been nice to have spreads for my overview, it would have been easier for the formatting of narrative parts, it would have been quicker overall, but at that point I was DONE with doing things by hand.
Me.jpg
FORGET THE SPREADS. I'll do things page by page and then export in pdf and then get my spread overview in Foxit Reader.
In order to cool down and to get my mind off of tedious things, I took a break to design the title page and chapter pages.
Initially, the chapter page was a joke, a colourful way to vent off my frustration.
Eventually, the joke stuck. The colours worked with the colours of the characters, the story was quirky enough that it fit well. It was never meant to stay, but I kept it. I added the author's note and the period corresponding to the exchange, before moving to the title page, for which I went full-colour again. And look, I even got to re-use the very first formatting I had envisioned in Step 2.1! Nothing was lost.
I can't say I struggled much with the fonts for this typeset. Almost everything is either Arial (messages) or Times New Roman (narration), with only Computo Monospace for titles and Consolas for metadata.
Oh, and talking about narration: typesetting it was so restful! Even with the added complexity of having to integrate text messages in between, things were just incredibly smooth. The only "fancy" addition to the obvious formatting were the coloured lines framing the text showing whose point of view we're reading from.
I was almost there, almost done. My title pages were complete, the narration parts were complete, the text parts were complete, everything was looking good, my laptop was NOT CRASHING.
One last (but not least) thing left: integrating images! Starting with ALL THE CAT PHOTOS which constitute 80% of the visual content shared by the characters. So. Many. Cat. Photos. My illustration folder was really satisfying.
Without digging too far into all the illustrations I had to find (including cosplays of Smurfs and Teletubbies—thanks for this, author. In case you're wondering: yes, there are photos of people cosplaying Smurfs and Teletubbies on Shutterstock, too), I still want to share my own personal masterpiece. Chapter 8 includes Keith in a party hat, so I summoned my best Paint.NET skills.
He was made to wear this.
I also needed to figure out something for the selfies they send each other. While finding screencaptures of Lance and Keith smiling was not really difficult, I would like to note that this is the first result I got when looking up "voltron keith smiling" on Google.
Thank you for nothing, Internet. No wonder I had to watch the series to get relevant screenshots.
And with the illustrations integrated as the final touch, the v1 of the typeset was DONE!
It was only a matter of printing and binding the prototype now, to ensure everything was looking good.
So I printed, which allowed me to confirm that 1. even if it's a lot of colours, it doesn't kill a printer or empty a toner and 2. it's Letter alright, my printer resented me for it.
Binding was a very underwhelming affair after all this mess. I did make a fun mistake by folding a signature in the wrong order, but everything else went super smoothly. Since it was a prototype, I didn't do anything fancy for the cover, only plain bookcloth: the Dubletta Purple Blue from Ratchford, with which I had fallen in love, but waited for "the right occasion to use it". Since we all know what "the right occasion" means and I actually really needed to make a dent into my stash (I don't have much room left for hoarding, I need to use the material now), I decided to break the curse of "not special enough" by using my dream bookcloth for a simple prototype. This way, it would be a nice prototype.
For the endpages, I simply printed a wallpaper with the lions that I found on the VLD community in Amino, on a red page and a blue page. I love mismatched endpages.
And with this, the prototype was done. Simple, efficient.
I still needed to proofread that mess. So I re-read the story.
For the fourth time.
In French, we say "Quand on aime, on ne compte pas"... "In love, don't count the cost." Well, I definitely learnt to love this story, going from not knowing anything about the fandom in September to knowing its most popular fanfiction by heart in November. Ask me about Call Me, Beep Me. I can quote any part to you.
It's still a good thing that I proofed it, because there were many mistakes in the typeset (and apparently still are. I re-exported it twice already since I began this post. @starstreampress, I owe you a fixed typeset.)
But at some point, you have to decide something is done. Complete. Over. So I decided I was done, and finally submitted the typeset to the Exchange mods.
Free at last?
Step 3: Recovering (literally)
"At some point, you have to decide something is done," I said just above. Wise words from a most unwise person. I had just decided that I was actually not done yet.
Because, see, I had invested so much time and effort in this that I thought I might as well make myself something nice. And the prototype looked so good in this bookcloth I loved. And its squares were even and straights, which never happens usually! I couldn't let it be just a prototype.
So I decided to print The Lost Art, just for myself, as an appendix, and learnt how to add a signature in an already made book.
I also re-made the cover (hence the title of this step!)
Nothing fancy, but I didn't want it to be bare anymore. I added a scrap of red cloth I had leftover from another project, and cut/glued 2 fanarts I liked to complete the look.
It's so nice, now. And gosh, I'm so glad it's done.
One last word...
I like giving sources when referring to things.
So here's a link to Call Me, Beep Me again. And here are the links of the art you could see in this post:
Lion wallpaper pattern from Amino
Front cover by Potatical
Back cover by Thefrieslord
All of these links are accurate. None of these links work anymore, save for the one to the fic, which has been orphaned.
The Wayback machine can do miracles, but just not quite enough for me to find the name of the person who made the lion pattern again, because I had not expected Amino to die between the moment I printed my endpages and the moment I wrote this post. I'm a terrible, terrible archivist, and the Internet is a neverending fire where full libraries are destroyed as computers are turned off and servers keep crashing. I will have to make my peace with it; there's a reason I bookbind, after all. At least, this story and the associated art I could recover will live on.
Author, artists, if you're out there and recognise your work—there's no expiration date. I know it's all been orphaned, and you probably wanted to forget everything about it, but if you stumble upon this project and happen to want a copy... just let me know.
Fandom never truly dies.
Now, excuse me while I go fetch new VLD fics to bind.
I told you this was all a big excuse to share my artsy screenshot. Look at this happy face, delightful in its glorious crunchiness. Have I mentioned the wolf is my favourite character?
I feel like a kid given free rein in a toy supermarket. Falling into a new big fandom is like stumbling upon the biggest buffet you didn't know existed. I'm only starting the appetizers.
Thanks for this, Rey.
And a massive thanks to all of you who made it to the end of this long, long runthrough.
As a conclusion, have this personal quote, with a most accurate reaction emoji:
This was all pretty fun, I learnt so much in barely two months, Excel is a surprisingly versatile tool. But if there is one thing I can take from this amazing experience, it is that:
lia, i genuinely did not fully appreciate the fact that this was in fucking excel until you laid all this out, you absolute madlad. and i thought google docs was bad to typeset in, wth……
and the fact it looks ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS?????? i’ve already sung the typeset’s praises but i also love the cover & endpapers you made, they’re just stunning!!
this fic is one i’ve longed to have a copy of since i started binding, and it really means a lot to me <3 it’s the first fic i got really invested in and reread multiple times—keith & lance actually go on their first date on my birthday!!—so seeing so much love & effort put into this?? genuinely getting emotional about it rn
thank you so so so much again, it’s been SO fun talking to you about voltron & revisiting one of my first fandoms & the fics i loved & have talked about with so many friends before, it’s genuinely kind of a healing experience :’)
(i’ll make sure to show you my own finished copy when i finish it in like. three months probably.)
For the 2025 Renegade Typeset Exchange, I typeset the Voltron: Legendary Defender fic Call Me, Beep Me, for @starstreampress, and bound a copy for myself as a prototype to proof it.
(Cover art by Potatical and Thefrieslord, endpages from the Amino VLD community.)
Don't let this book's relatively classic outside appearance fool you; this is in truth the weirdest project I've done, by far.
It was a love project: not so much for the fandom in itself (which I knew nothing about when I went into the exchange), but for absolute nerdism, fandom preservation and archiving. and most of all, silly complexity in typesetting. It's not fun if it's easy, right?
My usual typesets take me between half a day and a week, depending on their length, complexity, and the level of nitpicking I have the energy to put into them.
This typeset took me a month and a half, a lot of braincells, and more patience than I have.
Also, it took 9372 Excel lines with a hint of macros on top.
Because, you know. Which software better than Excel of all things to typeset a 85k word fanfiction, right?
Have some photos of the typeset:
And beneath the cut, here's a full rundown of my slow descent into madness, along with more photos and details. Buckle up; we're in for a long long ride.
Step 1: Researching
When I signed up for the exchange, I agreed that I was happy to bind fandom-blind. I'm always up for new discoveries!
Since I love Wrong Number AUs, Call Me Beep Me seemed right up my alley, even without knowing the source material. It was a fun read, and it would probably have stayed as such if not for two things:
1. These characters send a lot of photos to each other
2. A lot of art was drawn for this story.
Behold: a rabbit hole!
It may be orphaned now, but Call Me, Beep Me remains the most kudosed VLD fic on AO3 even today. It is monumental to the fandom enough to even have a Fanlore page! As such, it's no surprise that the story has plenty of fanarts. Neither is it a surprise that, in the almost 10 years since the fanfic was posted, many contributing artists went missing from the net, deleted their works or their accounts.
People grow and change and don't especially want to be associated with some of their past works. Orphaned stories, deleted blogs: these are just your regular fandom heartbreaks.
It was still quite painful to realise that of the almost 50 links listed at the end of the work, more than half were broken or sent to deleted pages/accounts. I don't deal well with things disappearing when they were just there and their trace is still here, and I'm frankly awful at letting go. This led me to a day-long research of the lost art. The Wayback machine came handy. The way Tumblr works also allowed to track down some of the deleted art. And, absolute plot twist, Pinterest (!), land of stolen art and dubious sources, actually helped with retracing the steps of the lost art. By the end of a somewhat-tiring day, my project folder was richer with almost 50 fanarts.
Except... things couldn't be too easy. I knew it would be touchy, but I somehow still hanged onto the hope that maybe I could chat with some of the artists.
I couldn't.
Which kind of sucked, because I needed their permission to include their art in the typeset that would be shared with the Renegade Bindery community.
I preciously kept the lost art, and scrapped my plans. Of all the photos the characters sent each other in the story, none would be the fanarts I'd exhumed. I still needed images, though, so I spent hours using my Shutterstock account to find generic photos that would work with the story. I've never browsed so many cat photos in such a short time. It was nice.
This was all good and well, but some of the photos in the story included the characters themselves. And, well. You won't find them on Shutterstock.
So I had to rely on the next thing I could use without specific permission: screenshots. The great internet is fantastic for screenshots! But it doesn't cover everything. So I looked up for clips of the episodes, so I could make the screenshots myself according to the needs of the story.
And obviously... well, try watching out-of-context scenes for hours, with only a vague idea of the characters that you formed by reading an AU. Guess what? I grew intrigued. Of course I did. So I went back to my beloved Internet Archive, that picked up where Netflix (shamefully) left off, and...
well
I watched Voltron. All 8 seasons.
I know, we are all very surprised it ended like this
We are still on my bindery blog so I won't go further in-depth about it: in spite of the length and details I'm walking you through, I'm still describing parts of the whole process of fankbinding. Don't say you weren't warned: I did open this post by saying this was a weird project!
(Note: if you're really invested in what I thought of VLD, you can ask me at @lia404. Let's keep the fanmess where it should be; that is, on my main.)
And with all that, I was done with Step 1: the Researching part of the project. After a few weeks, I knew more about a fandom and its material, about how the AU met with canon, about what the characters look like, how they behave, and what sort of photos they would send.
I had all the knowledge I needed to hopefully make coherent visual choices. I had a folder filled with recovered art that wouldn't end in the typeset, and a folder filled with Shutterstock photos and screenshots that would be part of the typeset.
Time to move to...
Step 2: How To Typeset Your Textfic (worst choices only!)
It goes without saying, I had never typeset textfics before this one. If I had, I don't think I would have picked Call Me, Beep Me for the exchange :')
I had already a template of formatting for text messages that I'd made for another typeset some time ago, and with it began the experimentations.
My main questions were: does it print well? Are the colours fitting? How busy does it look on the page? Would I read a full book like this?
Easy to answer: colour-wise, it printed rather well, it fitted the characters (now that I knew them), and I'd probably have needed so much toner to print 85k words of this that I could already begin filing for bankruptcy.
My template was lovely for short, in story-messages. Not for a story almost entirely made of messages.
So I tried again:
Fewer colours seemed more reasonable. I liked the format, too; I had this idea of doing a weirdly sized book, slightly elongated as if it were a smartphone. After some more thinking, I had to accept that while it could work for a 15-to-20k story, 85k was way too long to fit the "fun-sized book" aesthetic.
I still needed to make it more simple, so I removed the phone lines.
I was almost there; actually, that was good enough for me for a start, even if some fine-tuning would be unavoidable.
Having decided of the shape of the typeset, I realised that since it's quite different from the original story, I would have to make toher choices—and some that might impact the storytelling a little, so I had to do it intelligently.
On AO3, the author differenciates characters by changing the font between messages. They give the key at the beginning of each chapter:
Sadly, this doesn't translate really well on printed pages, and I already had my format in mind. The differenciation between characters would be through colours, and the formatting added an element: we'd read directly from the characters' phones.
This is when I realised the impact it could have on the story. Choosing to show the messages through the phone of a character was basically choosing the point of view the conversation would be read from. This was not only merely visual; it was storytelling. I had to ensure the choices were coherent.
A few examples:
When Keith messes up and accidentally sends a message to Shiro instead of Pidge, it felt important to keep the reader confused too. The formatting I'd planned for the typeset ruined the initial effect conveyed by the author's formatting on AO3, but I could still toy around with my own idea.
Instead of having Keith send the messages from his phone (which would immediately display the name of the character receiving the message, and thus ruin the effect of surprise of the recipient), I switched the point of view to Shiro then Pidge. This way, it's obvious that Keith is writing, but the recipient (from whose phone we're reading) is not as obvious just yet.
When Lance decides to give a stupid name to Keith in his contacts, or when he changes his contact photo, his phone needed to display it. And Lance has the occasion to do it a lot throughout the story.
These are obviously additions that were not part of the initial way the story was written, but that I couldn't avoid with the formatting I wanted to do. Might as well make them fun!
Receiving calls. While in Call Me, Beep Me, calls may be the only hint we have at whose point of view we're reading from, I still needed to find a way to display them in believable phone-way, and make them as impactful.
(I can't believe it but these screenshots just made me realise that there still are typesetting errors page 292. I will never be free.)
Playing with timestamps. One of the things I really admire with Call Me, Beep Me, is the author's consistency when it comes to using timestamps. In the whole 85k words of the story, I think I caught only 3 timestamp mistakes. All the timestamps are quite believable in the delay between each message, and while it's easy to disregard them when reading, it's super fun to notice the implications when you pay attention.
I thought that I'd put all the timestamps at the side of their respective messages, like the author does in the fic, but after pondering, I also decided to push the "messaging app" feel by adding this date-and-time stamp that appears after a pause in the conversation. I didn't have a clear rule for that, but I opted to add these stamps for breaks in conversation that lasted more than 5-10 minutes. It may seem a little short, but these characters chat A LOT, and 5-10mn breaks in a conversation actually doesn't happen that often.
Now that you've seen examples of AO3-to-typeset translation, let's rewind a little to the part where I was deciding on how to do my formatting. Basically, the center point of it was that while the original story was written with vague point of views, my typeset needed "actual point of views" in the form of whose phone we were reading the story from. Which could only mean one thing.
I needed to do a first print and re-read the fic.
Colour-coded, of course, because what are we? Animals? The first colour is the phone we're reading from. The second colour is the person sending the messages to this phone. The name written in full letters with a pen is the display name of the sender.
Once this was done, I finally had everything I needed: a good idea of what my formatting would look like, all the images I needed to embed in the text, and the key elements to shape everything together with timestamps and point of view. Now, it was only a matter of putting everything together. Easy enough, right?
...
...right?
As Tumblr refuses that I put more than 30 images in a post, I'm going to take a break here before we move on to the next part of typesetting hell; the one that most people I talked with were interested in; my walking nightmare for weeks and weeks; the part where I actually started using a software to typeset, with a deadline on sight.
when i saw @violoncellobindery ‘s the art of war: technoblade edition, i immediately thought of my little brother, who showed me his videos during quarantine. i even made him a techno plush after his youtooz plush took FOREVER to arrive (which i’ll put under the cut ‘cause it’s Old), and the cover fabric is actually the same as his cape’s.
i asked violoncellobindery if i could bind her typeset, and they agreed! so here it is <3
Theseus' Guide to Ruining a Perfectly Good Boat Binding
Name's Dream, howdy hey. I'm someone who just. Hangs in this fandom somehow. Theseus' Guide is if not one of my top, the top fanfiction in the Gravity Falls fandom for me. And as such, I really really wanted to bind it. So... I asked @stump-not-found for permission and got it for a personal binding! Here's the result [thus far].
More pictures under the cut! Including the special things I included. :] Some spoilers below as well.
I knew I had to do *something* special for these lines in Chapter 8. God. They hurt me.
I knew even before I began working on this wanted to include some of the comics. [There's more than what is pictured here!] But I had to ask how/where? At the end of the chapter where the doodled align to? Finally, I decided to add them at the end altogether. It felt like the most natural place for them to go.
The dust jacket! Given that there was no where cover art for Theseus' Guide, I had to decide on something myself and eventually settled on this piece of art by Stump. I'd rather have an image that depicts Stanley and Stanford and the kids as well- but hey! Something to consider if I want to replace the jacket or for Part 2.
Finally, the hardback itself. It doesn't have any detailing currently but the name, but I plan to add things. Currently, I have a project where I'm recreating Journal 3 by hand. When I get the brass metal plates needed for that, I hope to add custom 'gold' detailing to the book on the front and back, as well as the spine. But for now, I feel really proud of how it turned out.
It took forever to lay it all out in Latex and get it looking professional but I love the result. I might try my hand at a few other fanfictions I really love to add to my personal bookshelf. Hope y'all love it too!
[Pst. @starstreampress just released their own personal binding as well, which people should *also* check out.]
Theseus’ Guide to Ruining a Perfectly Good Boat by @stump-not-found !!!
forgot to take photos of the endpaper—will do that next time i’m at home, it was so fun to figure out :) also, what a nifty fic!! can’t wait for the rest of the fic so i can do this all over again >:D
i absolutely love 13 sentinels, and was disappointed to hear there wasn’t an english release of the post-canon manga, so i was really stoked to see @0ssianic translated it!! since i have a really difficult time reading manga online, i made myself a personal copy :)
stormborns
dededos
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
gummygunk
izzy806
romaincrisis
