#attention without intention

[notbecauseofvictories]

This might sound crazy but you accidentally shaped my life for the last ten years? in 2017 you made a post that had the phrase “strangers may be angels” and I’ve never forgotten it. I painted it in giant letters on my wall in 2017, and have carried those words with me for years. Now I’m getting ready to make myself a monotype that say those words for my room as I finish college. Not really much point but to say thank you. You were right all along

That's amazing. You read my Star Wars fanfiction almost a decade ago, and a line resonated with you so strongly that it's followed you ever since. I don't particularly like calling my fannish blatherings 'art' but I can't deny that....well, what are we doing here if it isn't?

[notbecauseofvictories]

I've now received four (four!!!) different copies of my fic, bound and illustrated by different artists---and there's still a deep, almost reverential feeling I get when I hold them in my hands, lay them out. Ironically for the subject matter, they feel decidedly holy. After all, where else am I going to get proof that I did this---even if "tell a story about music and the devil" is one of the sillier things you can do to occupy your time.

But to be less vague, this is the kind gift of @fleabitebooks / @kettle-bird! They reached out to me a few months ago, saying they wanted to bind my Devil Went Down to Georgia fic, and would I like a copy too? As I would never say no to a gift like that, I gleefully accepted.

If you've been following me long enough, you've seen their art in my Cornstalk Fiddle tag, and I am pleased to say that the images lose none of their power. I think the choice to stick to a limited color palette works beautifully here---the golden-yellow of the title pages and the larger art almost seeps through the paper. With the crisp lineart and shading, it ends up being both lovely and vaguely ominous, a sign of the eldritch things moving around/beneath the story.

(Also, I realize this is not a major aspect, but....I love how truly awkward-looking the Devil is. He looks like a Southern Gentleman, and I love that touch of weakness in his jaw.)

I also deeply adore some of the design choices---chapter 3 starting with the cornstalk fiddle and the triumphant starburst of golden-yellow? The white snakeskin-threaded-with-gold pattern used to bind the book? The way the paragraph breaks and endsheets are music? Amazing. Just amazing.

Maybe I should revise what I said above. Yes, having your silly fic about a country song turned into a physical book is proof that you did it, finished it---but it's also proof that someone else did too. In this case, @kettle-bird sat down with my fic and carefully copied it, played with fonts (oh, those are fantastic too by the way!) and spacings and margins; they drew art, colored it; laced the book together, made and bound the cover, then shipped it off to me.

Which means....if I did this, then I was hardly the only one.

[notbecauseofvictories]

hello I just wanted you to know that I stumbled on your blog when I was a kid (I think it was through AO3?) and I looked at your "some things rats won't do" tag for law school adventures in awe, and now I'm a law student, and every so often I'll come back just to reassure myself that yes, the world is this weird, and it's okay to struggle a little bit. and I hope you are having a good day, and if not, then that the bad times end soon for you. stay warm and may all your cookies be perfect

Thank you, anon! Today I answered work emails and made cookies for our office holiday party, and---deliberately did not think, even a little bit, about how I've been posting on this blog since November 2011 or how that's almost 40% of my life right there.

The good news is that it is okay to struggle a little bit. With law school, definitely! But also just with being human. It's a complicated proposition, to be in the world.

Fortunately, sometimes there are cookies.

[notbecauseofvictories]

As someone who previously only thought about book design as font choices and cover art, it’s amazing to me how many more options there are; just how very creative you can get with paper, stitching and ink.

For example, I never questioned how a new book should smell---at least until I received this copy of Cornstalk Fiddle from @fanboundbooks. Opening up the box, I was struck by it---and then when I lifted the book to my nose, I actually laughed aloud. @fanboundbooks had managed to ship me a book that smelled like the Devil’s cigarettes: all smokey, burning leaves and paper underneath. Combined with the burned and jagged edges of the pages, it make the experience of flipping through the book almost sensory in and of itself.

The burnt pages had another effect, whether intentional or not. If you turn the pages, then touch the white cover, you leave the black smudges of fingerprints behind. Given that the Devil leaves mysterious black marks on the passenger seat of Johnny’s truck, I thought this was---if you excuse the pun---cool as hell.

(I also love the textured and delicate green flyleaf paper. I’m not sure whether it’s a deliberate reference to the green of Ava’s garden, or if it was just chosen to be lovely---but it is my favorite color, so I just like it.)

Overall, there’s just something wildly impressive to me about three people taking the same story and turning it into three different books---different paper, different binding styles, different details chosen to emphasize, but all immensely creative in their own right.

[notbecauseofvictories]

I can’t believe this exists. That this is in my hands, that the words in that sharp serif are mine, that @kaasknot took the time to arrange them and make this book (a real book!) around them. You can’t even see the red-and-white striped thread binding in these photos, can’t run your fingers over the smooth marbled cover, can’t smell that smell, the paper smell, and shiver all over in awareness that after decades of haunting libraries and bookstores, this bit of paper is yours.

There are so many small details I adore---the mythopoeic sans serif of the titles, the thread of rust-red through the marbled cover, the fact that breaks in passages are indicated by musical notation for a full rest. However, my particular favorite is the small, subtle ouroboros on the spine. It looks like a printer’s mark and even though kaasknot sent me photos of the finished product beforehand, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize what I was looking at. A callback to the whiskey label that started it all---foreign, faded squiggles...a snake biting its tail...

I love it in particular, keep running my thumb over it and grinning.

Thank you, thank you, a million times over, to @kaasknot for this. I am overawed, I am undone. I keep reaching for it, just to make sure that yes, yes, it’s still there. It exists, and it’s beautiful.

[notbecauseofvictories]

I swear, I am slowly going to accumulate an entire bookshelf of hard copies of Cornstalk Fiddle. It will be the one bookshelf none of my visitors can ever ask about, but I will take immense private delight in it and then hopefully someone will end up with a weird old book bought secondhand in Chicago, and no context for it other than that.

This particular copy is the kind gift of @sightetsound! I tried to capture the gleaming seam in the marbled paper, because I think it’s my favorite detail. Especially because it stands out so brightly against the cool tones of the cover---and isn’t that appropriate for a story about the blues, and that fiddle of gold?

I also love that the cigarette gets used as a paragraph/scene break here. As a symbol, it’s not quite as blatant as the whiskey or the golden fiddle itself---but I loved the idea of the gold-tipped cigarettes, in the gold case, being offered out to Johnny like a scene from an old movie. A very genteel touch, for the gentleman devil.

As a final note, it’s really interesting to me that this copy is smaller (width and height) but thicker, more like a tabletop book than a poetry chapbook. It’s just a design choice, but sat next to each other the two copies I have compliment each other. And that I like most of all.

[notbecauseofvictories]

Hi. Sorry to bother you. I was wondering what your opinion is of people binding your ao3 works to put on their shelves?

I mean, my favorite is when they send me a copy to put on my shelf, but apart from that---my opinion is wildly positive! Bind it, throw it in a collection, link to it in your favorites list; say nice things about it, and me, and I'll drink it down like elixir.

I'm not sold on turning a profit from such things, but I love the internet's gift economy. If you explore my "devil went down to georgia as a gay novella" tag, there are lots of people binding it, making fan art...a couple weeks ago someone asked if they could make a Sims skin for the Devil and/or Johnny and while that's not something I ever thought about while writing, I'm all for it!

What is the internet for if we're not all sharing our intensely niche, slightly offbeat art with each other??

[notbecauseofvictories]

so i binge-read A Cornstalk Fiddle in one night (went to sleep at 5 am) and it feels like it made me temporarily insane?? i cannot describe how much i enjoyed reading it, i’ve always been a sucker for human/devil romance and your fic is simply delightful, haunting, slow, delicious, tender as— i can’t stop thinking about it and will certainly read it again and again. thank you so much for bringing it into the world

Thank you!! The response over the last few days has been so wonderful---the comments on AO3, the compliments here, the heartfelt thank-yous on twitter...I'm even delighted by the tags on that shitpost that question why it exists and why is it 32 thousand words???

I won't take up too much more time patting myself on the back---it's 2022, we have shit to do. However, this story brackets a significant period of my life, finishing it genuinely feels like closing that chapter. The fact that other people (people not me! people who had no reason to!) stuck around for the 3 years, 6 months, and 5 days between chapter one and chapter three is humbling. The fact that other people are discovering Cornstalk Fiddle now, in the flurry of new activity, is a source of inexhaustible delight.

I may have brought this weird-ass devil-fucking fic into the world, but it is (was, has been) the reception that made it all worthwhile.