Bookbinding Bima Sakti
Bima Sakti in book form - sort of.
Welcome back,
As a writer on this platform, one of my biggest fears is the prospect of Substack shutting down. That means much of my work will be lost. Granted, I have my works saved in my hard drive so it’s not like they’ll be completely lost. But I also do much of my editing directly in the Substack editor. This means that even if I were to recover my works in this hypothetical event, they would be in much rougher forms. Another method of recovery is my emails, since my Substack stuff are emailed not just to my subscribers but also to myself.
Yet so far I was only talking digital backup. But what about physical copies? What about backup in the “meatspace”. That’s where I get to the topic of this blogpost. As you may know, I write books. While they started out as ebooks or web novels, eventually they would make their way to print, allowing me to nab at least one copy for myself. As to be expected, I have a physical copy of my novel Inquisitor’s Promise; three of them in fact.
But as for the others, they’re all digital - but not for long.
was in my thoughts; but I’m not planning to sell books based on that universe. For one thing, Bima Sakti is still very much a work-in-progress. Furthermore, Bima Sakti is a collaborative project in nature (with as my running mate), so I’d rather keep this one free for the readers.After much printing and bookbinding (really cheap here in Indonesia), I finally got Bima Sakti in book form. Check it out:
As you can tell from the cover (that I made in about a few minutes), this is not for public consumption. Even so, it’s cool to finally have this in book form. Now let’s dig in for a read…
Remember when I said printing? Yes, I printed basically the entire Bima Sakti Substack. What you see above is the About page printed. Also, I didn’t want to use up too many papers so I set up the printing to have two pages per one paper. That’s why the reading is a little… unconventional. But it does the job for private reading.
Now let’s move on to the stories:
Yes, I included all of the stories here (as of the writing of this blogpost), including the Indonesian translation of Don’t Take It Personal. But what I really love is having the Peter Flannery stories in physical form. One of the reasons I really wanted to transfer Bima Sakti to “meatspace” is because some of the stuff there is written by Scoot, which means that I don’t have them in my hard drive.
Then there’s the encyclopedia-esque entries, such as this one about Jakarta in the 23rd century:
Finally, there are the "Exchanging Notes” posts in which Scoot and I publicly brainstormed the ideas for this universe through Substack posts. Why did I include them? Because there’s still a lot of work to do with Bima Sakti, and these discussions serve as helpful building blocks.
As you can see, I also printed out the comments for these ones since the comments were where we really expanded this world.
So that’s Bima Sakti in book form. Definitely not for public consumption, but a fine addition to my book collection:
Until next time, Michael P. Marpaung