Before a Fall by @queercore-curriculum
I started fanbinding in part because I’m so in love with fic and fandom and I wanted to contribute something, but I’m not a fine artist and I thought I’d never be able to write fic myself. Then I started listening to the Rusty Quill Gaming Podcast, and oh my god oh my god oh my god Zoscar, and all the gifts that Alex bequeathed the RQG fandom at the end of season 3. An 18-month time gap? A weird disease that requires characters to quarantine and strip naked every day for seven days? Mysterious and unexplained character trauma? Yes, yes, yes please. I was obsessed, and I wrote Before a Fall because I couldn’t stop thinking about all of these unanswered questions and I had to know the answer, so I wrote a 57k word answer for myself.
Before a Fall is incredibly self-indulgent, but I’m not ashamed. It’s my love letter to the enemies-to-lovers trope (the great love of my life), the romance genre, and of course to Zoscar and RQG. If you like Pride and Prejudice, want to read passages of When Passions Collide, or ever wondered how Zolf lost his sea legs and Wilde fell in love with Harrison Campbell novels, maybe give it try!
Binding, cover design, endpapers, and layout by me. Bound with hand-dyed variegated linen thread using a variation on a long stitch binding I designed myself. The endpapers are the love letters that Zolf and Wilde write to each other in the fic, and the peacock feather print was made with a stamp I carved. I wanted the binding of my fic to be as self-indulgent as the fic itself, and I’m pretty sure I succeeded!
More pics below the cut!
