Project

I've been busy lately, with a project that became multiple different things, that started from a small frustration.

I enjoy fanfiction. I like rereading my favourites. Not being a moron, I download fics to back them up. But when I reread, I tend to use the website (which is not my favourite way of reading & can be inconvenient if the site is down for maintenance, or I'm reading on my phone while travelling & enter a deadzone, or wanting to read on my phone while being conscious of battery like, but not being able to turn off wifi & data to save battery). Why? Because I can identify the fics I have saved. The thing is with epub readers is that they display your collection as a cover image, title, & author name.

Thing is, that works great for actual published books with identifiable titles & distinctive covers & author names you recognise. But fanfics rarely have covers so the app fills with a bunch of empty placeholder covers, the titles tend to be word salad lyrics from a song the author thinks is deep that have nothing to do with the fic, & the author names are random usernames that you tune out unless you really like a bunch of their works.

With fanfics, you need to be able to view summary & tags. I tried to find an epub reader on Android that was designed to show title & description rather than title & cover. I have a Windows device too, but that's less of a consideration. I browse Ao3 on desktop & that's how I read new fics (easier to leave comments), but when it comes to rereading my fave fics or reading novels, I prefer reading on my phone (or an actual physical book that I can carry with me) because it makes it more convenient to pick up & put down when I have time during my day. Since I don't have social media, reading is the primary reason I use my phone, actually.)

This was starting to get in the way of fic reading. So I decided I was going to make covers for all my bookmarked/downloaded (I only bother downloading fics I bookmarked).

This was a hell of an undertaking, as I had 81 fics bookmarked (& if I liked a series I only bookmarked to first fic in that series so there were actually a few more. That's not including fics that I've written & like rereading (this bitch wrote some bangers ngl). And most of the fics were based on book canons so had limited available images to use for covers, & I am not a graphic designer.

I decided to take the opportunity to ask myself if I really wanted to keep all of them. Which meant rereading a bunch.

My bookmarks are already somewhat curated. I'm not someone who bookmarks willy-nilly. My bookmarks are for complete (though with occasional exceptions) fics that I'll reread over & over. There are fics I quite liked that don't make the cut, because I know I won't want to read again. I just comment & kudos & move on. For WIPs, I use the subscribe feature & my browser bookmarks to track them. I also tend to clear out fics after losing interesting in the fandom they're for. Even if I think I'll still enjoy rereading them regardless, once some time has passed, I find I can't bring myself to care, so only a few end up surviving that.

I was still surprised by how many ended up getting culled. I realised there were fics that I assumed I'd want to reread but I just ended up scrolling past whenever I was looking for stuff to read, or had reread by found myself less likely to pick those. Reading through those, I found stories that I either had clearly lost interest in, however much I'd enjoyed them the first time, or fics where I really liked some bits but found others boring, & when rereading what I was actually doing was reading half the fic & scrolling through the meh bits.

I ended up getting down to 33 bookmarked/downloaded fics. I also figure that for series, I can splice epub files that are part of a series together, so 33 bookmarks meant 33 book covers.

Still, while it had been productive, it had kind of derailed the project to make my fanfic epub collection more convenient to reread. But then came the next step: creating the covers.

Yet again, there was some derailment. I didn't set out to be super elaborate. Find a suitable image, pick a cool font, play around with colours & effects. If I couldn't find an image, just make a little bit more effort with the font & background effects to make up for it.

First wrinkle: I hate Canva, & since it's treated as the only game in town, there's basically no competition. It's simultaneously too simple & too complicated. Too simple in the sense that it you want to create a social media banner or moodboard, & were either happy to pick whatever images were available or knew precisely what images you wanted to use & had them ready & to hand, it's great. If you don't want either of those formats & have only a vague sense of what you want, but know what you don't want, & want to experiment, it makes every step juuuuuust that little bit harder than it needs to be & really wants you to hand over money.

I mostly used Paint.NET, but it's not so good for text. Font Candy was perfect for adding cool text to images, but it's no longer on the Microsoft Store so if I want to use it I have to dig out my old half-dead computer hope it doesn't choose now to finally give up. Also, weirdly, Powerpoint. Yeah, you can use Powerpoint to make cool text & add it into images - who knew, right? It adds them as images, so you have to make any tweaks before copying & pasting it in, but it works.

The actual derailment came when I wanted to make images for SVSSS fics. The books have illustrations but they didn't work as covers, as I just wanted particular characters & wanted to be able to pick the background.

There are sites that will remove backgrounds, but they either struggle with detailed black & white images, or would only save in decent quality it you paid, or both. So I decided that if you want a job doing right, you have to do it yourself.

Cue me making a bunch of transparent PNGs from book illustrations by hand, using the magic wand select & eraser tools, & sometimes having to draw lines that had been covered up by a now-removed foreground detail. Which is fun when you can't draw (I dumped all my creative skill points into writing). I also did some MDZS ones. That fandom has a few PNGs at least, but I wanted a few specific things & omg wow was it hard to isolate things within that artist's illustrations (lots of detail & black on black on black shading & thin linework) but I had a vision & I wanted to see it through.

I got really into it & kept going beyond what I need to make covers before having to force myself to get back on track making covers that I was supposed to be doing. I plan to do some more & upload them as a service to the fandom once I'm done.

I made covers for all my bookmarks/downloaded fics, with a podfic album cover version of each one (not all of them have podfics, but I'll be ready if more of them get made), then moved on to my own fics. For my own, in addition to a book-type cover & an album cover for podfics, I made a small banner to go at the top of the posts on Tumblr & here. I'm mostly done now, with just my two most recently-written fics left to make covers for, with the rest now done & added to their posts (I only bothered adding book covers to final chapter post for each fic though).

Next steps in this cluster of projects within a project:
- Make the last few covers/banners for my fics.
- Make a fic rec post. I've been meaning to do that for a while, but this is a neat excuse. I can rec my faves while offering the covers to anyone else that wants to use them.
- Post the transparent PNGs I've been working on.
- Splice together series fics into a single fic & tweak any erroneous metadata. Add the fics to an ereader app (I don't want to use the same one as for my books).