Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed

Oh hey, like four days after I became (maybe) the first person to own a physical english set of mxtx books (very line-edited for svsss and mdzs), official english translations were announced XDDD

So, ANYWAYS, the translator who kicked this all off (and who previously went off on a friend who bound the second(?) physical non-plagiarized english copy of tgcf, at great expense of time and money) said a shitty thing when I was trying to celebrate. It's going to take ages to get all these fuckers published, which is a long time to leave a fandom without food, and I'm also feeling skeptical about whether the quality of the physical book artifacts will justify their price tag (I'm buying them one way or another, I'm just still up in the air about digital vs physical copies), so......

Hello, hi, this is where I've been since february, I Make Books Now

Spoiler: large? long. chronological order

Starting with one of my training projects, because I adore this book and was using parts of it from the start. But this was the first time where I did everything, while also feeling good enough to show it to people. Svsss in two volumes (the two on the right), my last adventure in having paper covers, and before I knew how to actually do good typesetting. I was a baby! God, I was so excited. And the whole thing was edited. It's so cute, but even at the time I knew I could do better and gave this one away as a gift, only now my standards have advanced enough that I'm MORTIFIED to have given this to someone I respect. My god. I have ragrets.



Next, tgcf in six volumes (book three divided in half), different red floral batiks for each cover (it took WEEKS to find them all) and white-and-silver spines for the present day books, black-and-silver for the depressing flashbacks. I kind of typeset this just to see if I could? Sort of with filler formatting, and inline footnotes, because I knew I would want that eventually, but of course I'm not going to BIND this now, I need to get better at bookbinding first. And oh, hey, these files are sitting right here, and what if I printed book one, just to see how it turned out? What if I printed ALL THE BOOKS? This is what my life has become.






And then I got a suspicious ask where I think I was riding the hairy edge of someone tattling on me to suika, and I have to say, I am NOT loving the way some of these translators are conducting themselves online. Flashbacks to like. bnfs of the 00s. Slash, a month or so after this, a friend bound tgcf for herself, and someone did tattle on her, and suika came to tumblr to accuse her of endangering the future of all danmei fandom. And accused her of stealing the pdf, and blah blah this is why suika had to remove the pdf from the carrd, because of people like this, and my friend is no different from a reposter, etc. Like, wow, if people had to pay like sixty bucks in simple toner costs every time they reposted a book, then spend hours of hard work assembling components into a book, things would be Different. (and then spock started feeling very oppositional-defiant about fanbinding as a subversive act. this is Foreshadowing)

(and please, i didn't steal your pdf, I stole your epub, and converted it to a file I could edit. I have standards.)

Thennnn, I forget time. Time is fake. I don't believe in it. But eventually I was like 'goddamn, I know better typesetting now, let's redo the love of my life, the scum villain's self-saving system.' So I did, I printed it, I did fancy fabric corners, which are much easier with paper covers, BUT HEY. I'm going to work out a standard piecing system eventually. I have been distracted by other developments, but this is on the to do list.




And then, about two weeks ago, I finished editing the ExR mdzs for meself, because I have Opinions about cnovel translation conventions these days, and am also just an insufferable snob when it comes to english prose, so I've been working on that since, uh, April. April 2020. I edited five-and-a-bit other cnovels before finishing this one. But I did it, binches, finished it, included 24 of the russian edition illustrations, included a character guide with family relations and name/weapon meanings, printed my own titled fabric spine because I can do that now, gave my book shoulders for the first time, gave myself five blisters sanding it, painted the motherfucking edges, it was GLORIOUS










And as I was still basking in the afterglow, the announcement dropped about the official translation XDDDD I'm too lazy to cross-check exact dates, but it was legit three or four days later. I was delighted, but mildly conflicted, because aw man, I'd wanted to have another go at tgcf now that I know what I'm doing. Imagine if I could paint those edges, right?? So I'm feeling kind of wistful, mostly excited, as I scroll through suika's thread looking for more info. And I'm taken completely off-guard but the sudden, out-of-nowhere admonishment that people who took it upon themselves to print the old translation are advised not to "flaunt" it online.

And then spock got very, very, very oppositional-defiant.

Anyways, yeah, if I get canceled, this is how it's going to go down. Tgcf hasn't happened yet, because I need to redo my typesetting and make it More Fancey, and that's just. So much. It's six files and 750k. But. Anyways. Here's mdzs mark two, where I found an additional set of russian illustrations (from photographs) and cleaned them up to match the originals (including sketches, it adds up to 49 illustrations in the book), and here's further experiments in shoulders and guillotines and edge painting. These have gold ink edges, not acrylic paint, which is a nice effect but ahahahaaaa expensive, wow. I also pushed the limits (too far) on how dark/busy a fabric I could print on for my spines, experimented with guillotine/shoulder order, and I ordered kintsugi fabric from spoonflower because Tee Hee Symbolism and also golden cores. I also redivided my whole thing into four volumes instead of three, because if i did shoulders then guillotined, I wasn't sure the other books would fit into my guillotine at all. Please ignore the spots where all my margins disappeared because trying to cut through shoulders apparently makes it impossible to make a square cut. Mistakes Were Made. But I salvaged the books, because I know how to do that now! (don't be fooled by my confident tone, i am an overconfident crafter, and also artificially energetic from late-night caffeine. i am more of a socially anxious, isolated disaster from ever, all i know how to do is infodump into a void)







And, uh. Then I was finished splitting this back into three to print, um. Again. Friday. But then I was wistfully checking out the fanyiyi translation of mdzs, which I've heard very good things about. It had reached chapter 46 (it won't be continuing). And I realized that oh shit, oh fuck, this is so much better than ExiledRebels (i still have thots about ironing out pinyin honorifics and some of the terminology, but it is a dramatic net improvement), so I am also now on pause while I take 180k of prose and fold the writing together, because sometimes one is better, sometimes it isn't, and I've got 150k to go. I also have a "job", supposedly, which is a problem, but I am hoping to have pages to fold by the time I have a happy hour on Thursday.

So that's where I've been! For months! There is nothing but bookbinding. Only books now. Food? Sunlight? No, just books. My tracking spreadsheet is out of date, but I'm somewhere in the realm of 80-90 books bound, I think, almost all casebound. It would be more, but editing is so slow. I was doing fanfic for a while, and then I got anxious about preservation of internet-only unofficial english translations of chinese webnovels, and then I was proven correct in my anxiety about the ephemeral nature of these books. So who knows when I'll have time for fanfic again. I still haven't bound anything of my own, asfdgasf. But I need to do mdzs again, maybe re-re-redivide my typesetting for four volumes because the three-volume set is going to be 500-550 pages a pop. I've done other cnovels, and have other cnovel text preserved and unbound, but some of it wants editing BADLY, but also I do love meatbun, and also I am uneasy about suika as a custodian of novel translations. Guys, my house has so many books in it. I need to re-typeset tgcf next. That alone will add like eight inches of book to my life. No, it'll be worse, because I need bigger margins. I may need to re-divide tgcf. I may never emerge from the bookbinding pit again, Tell my wife I love her. Nobody should hang out with me now, all I talk about is books and book construction and how expensive serious equipment will be, or about how much toner goes into a single printing of mdzs or tgcf and how I'm planning to do it anyways. Several times. Before the first light novels are officially released. The highlight of my weekend was a revelation about the size of scrapbook sheets I could use as endpapers. GOD, what has happened to me.

 

Mo Xuanyu: