We! Are! Printing!
9 months ago
– Tue, Jun 10, 2025 at 11:45:25 AM
Just a quick update this week to say the deck is OFFICIALLY IN PRODUCTION! The proofs have been proofed, the approvals have been approved, and the production machinery is turning to make this beautiful art a physical reality!
Printing should be finished around late June or early July, after which comes shipping. Because this is an overseas job, that's going to take a while -- roughly six weeks, give or take whatever chaos the Trump administration introduces in the interim -- but because we have BayCon coming up, we decided to make a tiny splurge, paying to have ten decks sent via expedited air shipping. We're hoping those will be here in time for the con, so we can show one off (and collect some more orders . . .) during our Guest of Honor stint there.
If you are going to be at BayCon, and you ordered a regular (non-gilt-edged) deck, please let us know! We would be delighted to hand-deliver your deck to you there, quantities permitting.
For everyone else, we estimate we should be able to start shipping circa late August. As I mentioned before, that will proceed in waves, depending on what extras you added to your order. More on that as we get closer to the actual time!
--Marie
Proofing in progress!
9 months ago
– Tue, May 27, 2025 at 03:57:34 PM
Fairly quick update this week, as there's a lot of stuff going on, and not a lot of time in which to do it!
The files for the pattern deck -- the art, the booklet that will come in the box, and the box itself -- are currently undergoing proofing at our printer. Once we have those finalized, printing will begin!
Meanwhile, I'm hard at work on finishing up the guidebook, i.e. the longer, freestanding book that will both go into greater detail on card meanings and include the rules of the games you can play with the pattern deck. One of the remaining tasks is to see whether I can in fact include quotations from the novels and short fiction without sacrificing layout legibility -- so that means we're still open to suggested quotes! As I mentioned many updates ago, if you think a particular (brief!) line is a great match for a particular card, send it in via this form. We already have a number of suggestions, but the more we've got to choose from, the more likely it is they'll all be apt, vivid, and short enough to cram into the book!
Other things are rolling forward as well, like the pattern dice add-on. More on those as we get closer to starting fulfillment!
Okay, back to the card mines I go . . .
--Marie
We are heading into production!!!
10 months ago
– Tue, May 13, 2025 at 12:31:53 PM
HUGE NEWS: the art is done, the calligraphy is done, the compositing is done -- we are gearing up to send the deck for printing! All that remains is finalizing the design of the tuck box and doing one last check of each card, making sure we didn't accidentally attach the wrong suit symbol or anything like that.
Now, most of you are probably aware of how the Republican Party decided to declare war on the United States economy via tariffs, particularly for items produced in China. And of course, that's where our printer handles larger jobs. The very good news is, we woke up this morning to the news that there is going to be at least a temporary reduction in the tariffs -- which, if it does indeed happen as planned (who knows, with the chaos of the current administration), means we'll be placing our order under better conditions than we would have a week ago.
Regardless of the tariff situation, though, you should know that we will not be adding a tariff charge to your orders. Some projects are having to do that, but our printer, PrintNinja, has done a really admirable job of softening the blow for creators like us. The deck is going to cost more to produce than we originally estimated, but not 145% more. And the money we raised above our goal (plus more recent orders via BackerKit) was always meant as a safety cushion for unforeseen expenses. So we're in an okay situation -- especially if the tariff reduction helps as we hope it will -- and you all don't need to worry about any of this being passed along to you.
I'm not going to make any estimates of shipping dates until we have the decks in hand, but right now, I can say that we'll be fulfilling orders in waves. (Since we're not using a fulfillment service, all of this is going to be done individually, by hand, around the demands of our respective jobs.) Orders that contain nothing but a deck and/or an enamel pin will go out first, while orders that contain other physical items like guidebooks, pattern dice, and deck bags will come after that, as will the gilt-edged decks. We'll have better predictions of timing around that later!
But to keep this from being All About Logistics -- and because, according to the schedule I've been following, this normally would have been a sneak peek at one of Avery's cards -- let me show you The Face of Weaving, completely with border and calligraphy!
This is the card of community, and I chose it for this update because we genuinely could not have done this without all of you and your support. Thank you SO MUCH for your patience, and we can't wait to get these decks into your hands!
--Marie
Sneak peek: Seven as One!
10 months ago
– Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 01:00:07 PM
This may have been one of the toughest cards to wrangle, compositionally speaking, because so many elements had to go into it.
It's the opposite of the last A.C. card I showed you, Wings in Silk, which has almost that East Asian ink painting simplicity to it. Seven as One, the card of institutions, refers to the council that used to rule Nadežra before the Tyrant's conquest, which in turn referred back to the seven Vraszenian clans. And it's right there in the name: seven. Seven people who somehow had to be crammed into a single card.
You can't quite see it in rectangle form, but our inspiration for how to compose this one came from the seven-card wheel layout Ren learns in The Liar's Knot. It's not exactly the same -- the people aren't arranged in the same way as in the wheel -- but it's still the basic idea of six of them in a ring, with Ižranyi/a szorsa in the center. (You can see her hands spreading the cards about a third of the way up the image.) I love the color gradient A.C. put in here, too, and all the objects making callbacks to other images, so that in a reading those elements might provide a connection to other cards in the spread.
Back in two weeks with another Face or Mask!
--Marie
Stretch goal short story #1 + some bits of news!
11 months ago
– Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 11:16:06 AM
My apologies for missing the update two weeks ago! I promise, that wasn't an April Fool's joke; it was just me falling over after Alyc and I finished the draft of the first Sea Beyond novel, and then having to pick myself right back up again to start revising it before it goes to our editor. Somewhere in there, the fact that I needed to send an update slipped through the cracks.
But to make it up to you, I have something shiny today: the first of the short stories unlocked as stretch goals during the campaign!
This is my contribution, and it's actually related to the pattern deck. You see, when we were naming the cards, Alyc and I decided we liked making the "Noun and Noun" cards alliterate. When we got to the card of adaptation, we dubbed it Hare and Hound -- but why? What does that have to do with adaptation? You get a brief explanation in The Liar's Knot, when Yvie is telling a story about Clever Natalya, the Vraszenian trickster heroine. There's a folkloric motif called a transformation chase, where one person tries to escape by turning into different things, but their pursuer thwarts each one with an equivalent transformation; because Alyc and I are both folklorists, we decided that was a suitable match for the card of adaptation.
But since Yvie's summary was quite brief, I always wanted to write the full story -- and now I have! You can download a PDF of "Clever Natalya and the Sorcerer of Souls" from Dropbox now.
(I tried to also make an epub of it, but . . . yeah, turns out I am not very good at doing that. (All my reprints and Patreon collections and the like are formatted for me by a fellow Book View Cafe member.) My plan at the moment is to take a little more time and have both my story and Alyc's in an epub together later on.)
Meanwhile, two bits of news that actually have nothing to do with the pattern deck, but I have to crow about them anyway . . .
The first is that I am up for a Hugo Award! Each Worldcon can add a special category of their choosing; this year, Seattle chose Best Poem, and my piece "A War of Words" (free to read at that link) is one of the finalists. Both Alyc and I will be in Seattle this summer for the con; if you're there, please come say hello!
And the second is that, on the heels of the Broken Binding doing their special edition of the Rook and Rose trilogy, Wraithmarked is putting out a special edition of the Memoirs of Lady Trent! If you head on over to that link, you can become a pre-launch follower of the campaign, which means both that you will be notified when it goes live and that you'll help boost its visibility in Kickstarter's algorithms. Wraithmarked has a long tradition of making beautiful books; this one will not only reprint Todd Lockwood's justifiably classic art, but it will have new full-color art on the dust jacket, black-and-white art on the dust jacket interior, and black-and-white art throughout the volume. Note that this is an omnibus for the first three books of the series; there will be a second volume containing books four and five, plus the short fiction -- including a brand-new short story, "The Incident at Booker's Club"! But if you want the series, definitely don't wait for that second campaign: it'll be cheaper if you back now rather than buying the overstock later, and sometimes the overstock sells out shockingly fast.
That's it for now, and I'll be back in two weeks -- I promise!
--Marie
