Dispatch from the Print Shop

A meditation on creation, mistakes, and play

It’s a busy week getting Ephemeris off to print – as of writing this, I’ve printed about a third of the content pages and will tackle the covers in just a few hours. It’s the special moment of truth – the ideas materializing physically, the mistakes laid bare and irrevocable.

There’s a beauty to that, of course. We might be haunted by the stray typo three pairs of eyes missed, or the illustration that refuses to register perfectly, damned as it is by the machine-gods of risograph, but the beautiful thing about print is that it seals moments in time. I look back at Retrograde (only a year behind me now) and the ways my skills, my practice, my patience have improved is plain to see. It’s a strange road, but bit by bit, it’s taking me wherever I’m going. It’s nice to bring along some keepsakes. 

In theatre, every night’s performance would vanish into the immaterial after the proverbial curtain fell, living on only in memory. The mistakes stick a lot more than the triumphs. That’s normal, in the sense that negativity bias saves us from making lethal mistakes more than once, but it clouds the road ahead for a student. I have to push against the fear of repeating my mistakes when I sit down to create; I have to remind myself of the lessons I’ll learn from every experiment, especially the ones that don’t go as planned. 

One might think the permanent reminder of imperfection print leaves makes that feeling worse, but for me, it makes my post-mortems more objective. I can identify in clear terms what went wrong, and keep the artifact as a reference of what to do and not to do going forward. And, not to wield this too frivolously lest it become an excuse, the imperfection of analog art is part of the point. A risograph machine will never register every print exactly the same across a 200-unit run. Letterpress will never distribute ink as consistently as offset, because I’m throwing ink on the rollers by hand. Every intervention of the human hand is a possible point of failure, but it’s also the point. 

It’s a special thing to hold a book that is truly unique, whose ink patternings differ from anything else in the world, whose creation has left a physical impression you can feel with your fingers. It’s yet more special to use that artifact to tell a story unlike any other, the story you tell with friends or yet-to-be-friends around a table where things can go wrong, where some problems cannot cleanly be solved, where we must negotiate and risk the odds and err and err boldly. 

This is what the nexus of analog art and tabletop RPGs gives to us: an experience where we can safely make mistakes. We can try things and enjoy seeing how they play out even if they don’t go as hoped or as planned. The same is true of life, and while it’s not always easy to find the joy in life when things don’t go the way we want them to, we can at least carve out some moments of play where that unpredictability is a gift and a joyous one. I’ve been lucky enough to find moments of play at the table that inspire me and give me catharsis – the unreal, our play simulacra, affecting the real, my human feelings in my real life. 

You can maybe see a part of the bigger picture for me here – my creations always feel like play, and play begets and is begotten by creation. 

I’m proud of what I’ve made with Ephemeris. I don’t think it’s perfect, and that’s good. It’s helped me identify places to grow, techniques to learn, lessons I’ll take onto the next project, and the next, and the next. Truly, it still feels like the beginning of the adventure, and it’s exciting to know there’s still plenty to learn. I have a feeling I’ll enjoy every experiment along the way. 

– Zosimos