#250 | Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake
CHICAGO, SOMETIME—Two people meet in the armory of the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. After their meeting, those things do not change. Everything else, however, is slightly different. Both obsessive, eccentric personalities, Aldo Damiani and Charlotte Regan struggle to be without each other from the moment they meet. The truth—that he is a clinically depressed, anti-social theoretician and she is a manipulative liar with a history of self-sabotage—means the deeper they fall in love, the more troubling their reliance on each other becomes. An intimate study of time and space, ALONE WITH YOU IN THE ETHER is a fantasy writer's magicless glimpse into the nature of love, what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken
When Olivie Blake reached out to me to create a special, unique edition of Alone With You in the Ether, I was a bundle of emotions—honored to have been approached by one of my very favorite authors (of both fanfic and original fiction); ecstatic to have been told I’d have full creative freedom; and touched, because she would pay me for my labor. (As you know, fanfic bookbinding is a not-for-profit hobby. Any fanbinder with morals would know this. But AWYitE is original fiction, therefore, I can profit off of this project.)
I immediately drew up sketches of how I wanted the book to look. Every step of the process was meticulously planned—from the goatskin leather that I hand-dyed myself to the glow-in-the-dark cross stitch title. Picking the rights fonts also took a couple hours of testing.
It was also nerve-wracking to finally pull out my $2000 brass pallets that had been gathering dust, so I could hot tool the leather. Gilding was a bust, but I’ll nail that finicky gold foil next time.
I’m also very proud of the typesetting. When I edited the original document from Olivie, I noticed that Chapter 1 started on page 6, which fit the hexagon vibe of the story. However, when I pointed it out to her, she told me that that wasn’t even planned! I added more hexagonal motifs to the book, trimming the margins to achieve a borderless look.
“Regan, he thought, Regan, this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.”
I say this about all my books, but this one truly is a labor of love and admiration.
Alone With You in the Ether is a masterpiece of a story that makes you sit and brood long after you’ve turned the last page. You can find it here. And don’t forget to check out Olivie Blake’s website, where you can find other amazing works she’s written!
