Summary: blog purpose, safety rules, introduction to paper world, first interaction with paper world
The reason I'm making my diary digital is to circumvent, what I assume is, one of the key components of paper world.
Every part of paper world I have been able to find has been, well, created or printed on paper. Which is why I will ask any potential guest on this blog not to print out anything found here, and especially not paint or draw or write on paper about it. For safety's sake. Nothing against traditional art, I just want to be on the safe side.
My run ins with paper world started long before I even understood it existed, and paper world's interaction with the world will remain long after I'm gone. These are the only two things I am sure of.
A third thing I am almost sure of is, you will know, instinctively, if you come across paper world. You won't know-know it, you won't understand it, you may not have the words for it, but it's ever so different from being immersed in a book or imagining things. And no, I don't have carbon monoxide poisoning.
The first sign that you've encountered Paper World is; the story reads you, as much as you read it.
That sounds dumb typed out like that. You'll just have to know. There's this eerie sense that, you are the story, the characters see you, hear you, maybe you can even smell the flowers on the page.
The second sign is; immersion. Beyond a daydream, beyond getting engrossed in the story. For a moment, all that existed WAS the story. It wasn't a story. It was life. It was the moment. If you lived in the moment, the moment was Paper World, and when you get back it lingers. Not as a thought. As a sensation. You might even see the imprint of it, a hint of something at the corners of your eye, or, if you're unlucky, yourself on the paper.
That happened to me once. I didn't understand at the time, more than that I never wanted to read that book again. I wasn't in middle school yet, though I could read, and my grandpa took me to the second hand shop in town. I could pick anything I wanted under 50 sek. Book worm as I was, I padded over to the older children's section where they had nonfiction about animals.
Something else caught my eye, though.
With a red back as though it was stolen from a library, it sat on the lowest shelf, standing taller than the other books. It didn't belong. Too tall, the wrong genre, no alphabetical sorting. No price tag. 0 was less than 50 and that was all that mattered to me. I picked it up and grandpa haggled the price to 20 sek.
I read it on the school bus.
The text was simple enough for a 1st grader to follow, though I must've been in 3rd already. Watercolour illustrations covered every page. A family of three, mother, baby and father, as plain as can be. What we'd call a "Svensson-Svensson" if that tells you anything. Think, average white middle class family. Only something felt off.
When a house is pristine like an Ikea catalogue it doesn't feel like anyone lives there. That's how the book felt.
The bus ride passed me by. I chalked it up to my wild imagination and the high quality of the book, though I no longer consider that the truth. Because. At my stop. Right before I got off, farther down the line of kids who were going to the same school, was a family of three. Mother, child, and father. Straight from my book.
I could've been wrong. To make sure I opened the book, to a random page, somewhere in the middle, and what I saw wasn't the family staring back at me. It was their house seen through the window of my own room. My own pyjamas laid on the bed.
At school I taped it shut and covered the whole front and back with markers. When I got home my neighbour's house looked just the same as usual, and it relieved me, but I still check my window sometimes just in case.
That started my collection. I have found 14 samples of this phenomenon I call paper world.
At first I thought they were separate works. They all told different stories in different styles by different authors. Some were even handmade watercolour animations. Not even books!
The similarities popped up the more I studied them. (I'm very very careful not to read a full book from front to back.) Characters would overlap. Backgrounds would show up in different works, by name or appearance or even vaguely hinted at on a map. No, I can't 100% confirm a comic panel is the same place as a swamp on a fantasy map, yes, I'm still 100% sure it is. You'll have to take my word for it.
It is my theory that paper world actually is a world jus like our own, though bound by completely different rules.
These books don't technically exist. Searching for works by the same author yields nothing online, even as I have a trilogy from a certain W. A. Gallenbury.
To anyone with experience of paper world, PLEASE send in your stories. DMs or ask box or submission doesn't matter. All I ask is that you under no circumstances re-read or re-watch anything with ties to paper world. No links to videos should be posted for anyone to see, though short clips that don't contain the whole story might be safe to watch. DM if you're unsure.
