We Waste the Same Day Like Nobody Dies, by Newredshoes

I’ve lovingly referred to this project as “We Waste the Same Day Like Nobody Dies: The Illustrated Edition” ever since its inception [mumblemumble] months ago (since, if you haven’t seen it yet, @teleportbooks also made a beautiful binding of the same series!). magpieandwhale is another friend I’ve known for TWENTY FREAKIN YEARS somehow; I knew I was going to make her a copy of this as soon as she finished it, and I had the great joy of giving it to her in person last week while in her city for a family wedding ❤️

This was another design that got slammed sideways at the last minute by finding the perfect cover paper. Last month, Renegade Publishing had its first-ever retreat, which included plenty of paper for swap and sale – and what should I find on the swap table but that incredible gold-and-black Art Deco-ish stuff? It fit so well with the titling I’d already done that I immediately switched it up from a full cloth binding to a quarter-binding, with an inset carved out of the board for the title to sit in. For contrast (and a little intentional clashing), I went with silver-and-black on the endpapers, to play with the idea of Xue Yang and Wang Haoxuan as two not-quite-separate entities with much more in common than either wanted to believe.

The spheres in the cover design reference a scene partway through the third story, “shatter what you will not carry”:

Xiao Zhan twirls his pen and digs up a fresh piece of scratch paper. “Okay. Think of a ball of some sort.”
“Make it a football,” Yibo says, bone-dry. Involuntarily, Haoxuan laughs. His real legacy, right there.
Xiao Zhan scoffs. “Too complicated, I’m not drawing that.” He sketches out a sphere. “A ping-pong ball. One half is black, one half is white.” He draws a vertical line down the middle, giving it dimension, shading it into a half-moon. “Do you get it? Two colors, one ball. If you rotate it so one color is facing you, the other is still there. Sound familiar?”
Haoxuan glances at Yibo; his gaze is fixed on Haoxuan, stolid. It bores into him. Haoxuan swallows. He dabs his face with a napkin.
Xiao Zhan keeps narrating. His pen dashes across the image. “Okay, now spin the ball on its axis. It’s still the same ball, it’s still got both colors on each side. But now that it’s in motion, the colors blend. The ball is.” He wrinkles his nose. “Gray. Should have chosen better colors. But now it’s a whole new thing, still with its component parts. Are you following?”

And the art! THE ART. cloudy-recesses, thank you so so much for letting me include so many of your incredible pieces – whether they were made especially for the fic or just so fitting that magpieandwhale yelled “THAT ONE! I LOVE THAT ONE!” as we were hashing out what to include.

You can read the whole series at the link above, and see a whole lot more of cloudy-recesses’s art on their Tumblr!