Book two! This is the one that settled me as ride or die for Qi Ying Jun. This is Cheng He Ti Tong/How Ridiculous/How Dare You! As you can tell, the author's secondary talent behind writing great books is coming up with titles that are impossible to translate/search consistently. But it's worth it!!!
I'm not going to get into a full pitch here, this post would be way too long, but like 'You Yao,' this is also an extremely meta transmigration story. In this case, our book opens with Wang Cuiha, an unremarkable modern office drone, reading a book on her commute home from work. As a seasoned transmigration reader, I'm like ohohoho, I know where this is going. However. The book she's reading is itself a transmigration novel.
So from the start, I knew I wanted to play with the layers of transmigration in this book and how I bound it. To complicate things, ehyde did an absolutely GORGEOUS binding earlier this year featuring nested cutouts in the cover to represent the same idea, and I didn't want to just be a copycat! So, other than trying a paper vellum flyleaf for the title page, I kept it pretty straightforward with the binding...
...so I could go ABSOLUTELY HOGWILD with an enclosure!!
Here's the rundown of the layers I was working with
The "original" novel - 'a thousand trees bloom at night in the east wind,' a straightforward harem drama
The "fictional" transmigration novel - 'transmigration: the devil's beloved consort,' a straightforward transmigration story
The "real" transmigration novel I read - 'how dare you,' a meta romp where oh boy I'm starting to hit semantic satiation on the word 'transmigration'
The easy way out would be to do three separate enclosures, but I didn't want the easy way out, I wanted something NEW. So this is a single unit! By the power of glue. All three lower trays are directly nested in each other, built up so I could nicely cover the tray walls and exposed parts of each floor. I did end up doing some rapid-fire trigonometry as I went, to make sure the boxes had space to open, and that someone could get their fingers in there to do it. And this used SO much board, haha. That's literally my last piece of heavy board as the outermost cover there, and if I'd gone a later further, I would have actually gone past the size of my 12x12 board sheets.
The colors and papers were the other thing I wanted to give close attention to! I used duo cloth for all the covers and walls, then wanted to select a meaningful color progression and patterns for the floor papers. So we started with dark green and purple cloth for the 'original' novel (with a sedate, restrained marbled paper), then moved to purple and blue cloth for the first layer of transmigration (with a marbled paper that was brighter and more chaotic), then finally blue and teal cloth for 'how dare you' itself, and a paper that went full chaos!
I'm so, so pleased with how this turned out, making new types of enclosures is always such a thrill. So to wrap this up, have a video of the box in action!
