e-readers and fanfiction (part one)

i love dedicated devices. they're genuinely some of the best things you can own. i bring a sony walkman wherever i go which contains a back-up of every CD i've ripped from my personal collection, public libraries, and borrowed from friends. i use a portable cd player for an hour a day, in my home, as a method of de-compressing from my high stress job. physical media will always be a big part of my life.

sadly, i'm in the rental hellscape, so i'm limited for space. last year, i made the switch from kindle to a kobo libra colour . i'm not the most fussed on colour e-ink (i still think b&w looks much better, sorry) but the page turn buttons, public library access, and liberation from the clutches of amazon were too good to ignore.

since then, it has become my preferred method of reading fanfiction!

if you love it, download it

i've always made a habit to download every fanfic i've ever loved in both pdf and epub format. why? because things are taken down from the internet all the time. if you've ever bookmarked a fic, only to find out it has been deleted or made private, then you know what i mean. so, if you love it, download it or else it will be gone - especially when it comes to justice themselves. let us never forget the partnergate video incident.

if you love it, download it

software, gameware, strangeware

the best part is, whenever ao3 is down for maintenance (or, if you're without internet for a while) your favourite fics will always be accessible to you. not a lot of fic writers cross-post these days, so it's entirely on you to make your copies.

downloading fics might seem excessive, but to me, it's a great way to unwind after a stressful day. it's like curating a little fanfic library, where i can display works created by my insanely talented friends. there is, however, one minor downside to downloading epubs and pdfs from ao3, especially now that i have a nice colour e-reader...

the default covers are ugly!

well, why not create your own? you don't need to be the greatest artist in the world and you sure as fuck don't need to use AI to create one, and please kindly fuck off out of my orbit if you use AI. this is not a space for anyone that leeches off the hard work of others.

if i want something done under a minute, i use a penguin classics psd template, which i probably downloaded from deviantart ten years ago. i've modified it to suit my personal aesthetics and fit my e-reader screen dimensions.

here's what those penguin editions look like if you're not familiar:

simple, but much nicer than looking at a white page filled with tags, right?

the process is easy. you can even use this handy little website here!

Penguin Classics Cover Generator

Create and download custom Penguin Classics book covers

as for creating a cover image, there's plenty of ways you can do this. for my method, i use a pirated version of adobe suite (lol), but any basic editing software will do just fine e.g gimp, photopea (online), etc. you can scan images from your magazines, take photos, or even draw a cover if you want to. there is tonnes of public domain art online for use too:

Public Domain Image Archive

Explore our hand-picked collection of out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

Public Domain Treasures

I enjoy browsing and collecting public domain art. Usually I have a vague idea of doing Something with it Eventually... even though I mostly don't. Sometimes I do though!

have a browse, use these resources to create your own posters, collages etc. i've seen a lot of friends make covers for their personal zines and fanfics from taking screenshots of from movies, arranging them in a way that provides a visual component to their written work. hell, draw stick figures for all i care - as long as you did this without AI, you're cool with me.

honestly, the possibilities are endless. just remember to keep it for personal use only. if you're looking to use fanart, i recommend some common courtesy and at the very least, reaching out to the artist and asking for their permission to use their art in this way, or checking their profile for terms of use etc.

once i'm done, i save the file then use calibre to add the cover to the file, then sideload the fanfic to my e-reader. calibre looks a bit daunting at first, but it's a great program, and it's very satisfying looking at collections of fanfiction that my friends have made!

here's some of the silly covers i've made for some of my fics. they're mostly for my own amusement:

b-sides of a heartbeat

these covers are for my b-sides series , which i'm the most fond of. i'm yet to release two of the fics on this list (oops) but they're somewhere between a 00s romantic comedy, meets alice in wonderland and house (1977) dir. nobuhiko obayashi. gaspard has an extensive conversation with the E.T dolls he collects. full disclaimer: i've never seen the movie.

the covers themselves were inspired by the kpop group, Loona, whose albums were designed by Studio XXX, one of my favourite graphic designers. there's a lot of orbits in the jaoisphere - if i were to explain that niche music connection, we'd be here all night - so it was amusing to make these. anyways, as a justice fan, i'd be a fool not to pay homage to their origins as insufferable graphic design nerds, so please check out some of her extensive work below!

Studio XXX

Studio XXX on becoming one of K-pop’s most prolific graphic design studios

Seoul-based graphic designer and Studio XXX founder Jiyoon Lee talks us through the “unexpected” success of K-pop and its visual world.

as always, thank you to the orbits who, for some reason, love reading my jaoi despite having never listened to a justice song. one day i'll release that medieval lipsoul fic. one day.

shut up and drive

genuinely the weirdest fanfiction i've ever written with my partner in crime, aetherhue. not only is it a gender bend story (affectionally called juri, or femstice, by the fandom), it's also a fever dream post-colonial criticism of our respective countries and love letter to our favourite genre of films: "gay people in the desert"

have we lost you yet?

this poster, inspired by the film thelma & louise (1991) dir. ridley scott, starring susan sarandon, took me a grand total of twenty minutes. armed with adobe stock and a dream, i think i did remarkably well. the rabbit hole doesn't stop there.

why iconic lesbian film, thelma & louise? well, susan sarandon made a wonderful, sexy appearance in the justice music video "fire", where she does some sick burnouts for our favourite passenger princesses. we love this video (and era) but this music video could've been gayer. basically, this fic is a gay lesbian fantasy.

and what does rihanna have to do with this? we love this video of xavier de rosnay presenting an award to rihanna and decided that in the juriverse, xavier would cry to rihanna's hit album good girl gone bad: reloaded miles high in the sky instead of crying to the disney pixar film, cars, which he admitted on a podcast...? never change xavier!

roll that b-roll

i'm a bit cold and blunt, but i love romcoms. call me crazy, but gaspard auge...he's got it. romcom leading man. i can't love a flawless romcom actor: i want him to be a a douchebag with charm. hugh grant was arrested for cheating on liz hurley with a sex worker and is still, to this day, a romcom king. do i think gaspard has that quality? yeah, you bet. the perfect amount of sleaze, as we saw in a cross the universe .

did you know, this 13 poster series i made was actually from an extensive actor au, involving in-universe meta scripts, and a tonne of speculation about these being a couple off-screen? well, now you know!

is all of this pointless, or excessive? not at all, because it makes me happy. i try spend an hour a day doing pointless things for myself, such as this. chances are, if you've created fanfiction in this niche fanbase, i've created a cover for your fics because they have a home on my e-reader.

who cares if people like to annotate their books or their fave fanfics? i find it silly whenever i hear that people online think it's ironic, or performative, when someone wants to personalise their life a little bit. i simply wouldn't be happy without digital gardening. this is way of curating my own little digital greenhouses, such as my my leaflet publications, or my clunky jaoi website that is an ongoing labour of love, or the microblogs i run for an audience of one (me).

downloading fanfics, creating covers for them so i can display them nicely on my e-reader...? this is just another form of digital gardening. i wanted to share why i enjoy it and why i do it, so maybe someone out there might feel inspired to try it too!

...but what about annotating?

that's why i'm on leaflet. but we'll get to that next time ;)

stay frothy!