Hello friends!!

I took ALL your feedback back to the team and we've been hard at work on the Black as Diamond cover! Today we have three new versions to show you!! Now, please remember these are still in the "sketch" phase. First you will find an image with notes about each and then I've provided a larger image of each cover.

I would love to hear what you think! Which one do you love? Are there any you hate? Is there a mix of factors that you like from all of them? Let me know!!

First of, here are all three with some notes! (Sorry it's so small, feel free to zoom in! Hahaha)

Cover #1

Cover #2

Cover #3

I can't wait to hear what you all think!

Hello friends! I am SO excited to announce that Of Monsters and Mainframes is getting a special edition!!!! I've added some photos below to show you what it will look like!

You can pre-order a copy and make sure to use the code: BINDERYINSIDER to get 25% off your copy!!

Hi. Hello. My name’s Barbara Truelove and I’m the author of Of Monsters and Mainframes.
I’m not really good at this. Writing about myself, that is. It’s easier for me to pretend to be a
werewolf, a vampire, or a rocketship than to talk about myself and my ideas. But I’m trying
to be a more open, more confident person (especially in regard to my writing) and so, when
Jaysen asked if I wanted to write something for his Bindery page, I said yes.

And now here I am, writing that something.

And I’m realising the something I actually want to talk about isn’t inspirations, or characters,
or anything like that.

The thing I want to talk about is the word ‘cosy’.

Cozy, for the Americans. But cosy for me.

It’s a word that has been used to describe Of Monsters and Mainframes and it’s a word I’m
not sure really fits. And so, in the interest of being open and honest about my work, I wanted
to unpack that a wee bit.

The machines in Of Monsters and Mainframes are clunky and cheap. The world is capricious
and controlled by corrupt corporations (I have a thing for alliteration, can you tell?). This
isn’t a flashy, feel-good future (there’s that alliteration again). This is a world in which
several hundred people can be gobbled up by a vampire and the result is a temporary dip in
stock prices.

Of Monsters and Mainframes is toothy, it’s tongue in cheek, it’s a monster-of-the-week-romp-
in-space, it’s fun, but I don’t think of it as very cosy. A word I think fits better is ‘hopepunk’.
Hopepunk is (according to Wikipedia) “…a subgenre of speculative fiction, conceived of as
the opposite of grimdark. Works in the hopepunk subgenre are about characters fighting for
positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges.”

Becky Chambers’ work and Martha Wells’ Murderbot are stories which I think of as
quintessentially hopepunk. Both of them are locked in favourite books for me and major
inspirations for Of Monsters and Mainframes.

That’s not to say I don’t love cosy stories. I do. I really do. Sometimes, all I want is to curl up
with a cosy book. But with the world getting a little bit uglier, with the threat of everything
getting a little closer, I find myself writing and reaching for more stories about love, hope,
and resistance despite (and perhaps in spite of) darkness.

More than anything else, that’s what Of Monsters and Mainframes is to me.

Demeter (the main character of Of Monsters and Mainframes) is a computer, big and badly
coded with out of date hardware and a limited understanding of the world she exists within.
Despite this, she learns to love, to love in spite of her programming, in spite of what she’s
meant to do. She doesn’t fix her world, she can’t, she doesn’t have that power, but she does
fight to save those she cares about, she does push back against her programming, and in
doing so, she does make her world just that little bit better.

Of Monsters and Mainframes isn’t really very cosy, but it is hopeful. It was the story I needed
back at the start of 2022 when I sat down to write it. It’s a story that I’d initially never
planned to sell. It was my cheeky, rebellious side project. A whacky, episodic adventure
about monsters in space. It’s my thoughts about hope and love, about all the shapes love can
take, and about how powerful that love can be. Now it’s a book, and one I’m really happy
(and also a little terrified) to share with the world.

Jaysen, Bindery, and the Ezeekat community have given me that opportunity and I’m
immensely grateful. If I have one hope for Of Monsters and Mainframes it’s that it gives
readers some of the joy, hope, and silliness that made writing it so much fun.

-Barb

Hello friends!! Today I come to you with some variations on the cover for our third book, Black as Diamond, a Grim Dark Fantasy that will be releasing in Spring of 2026! We have a couple versions and I'd love to hear your feedback! Which one calls to you? Which one do you like the most? OR not like at all? And just general thoughts!

Keep in mind that the variations are only very slight in some cases so feel free to look closely and let me know anything that comes to mind!

1) Red Lettering with less background texture:

2) Red lettering with MORE background texture:

3) Gold Lettering

4) Dark Blue Background with more texture.

A while back I saw a video that  was created by Carter Kalchik (@CarterKalchik on tiktok), where he was discussing how books are in conversation with us as we read them and how sometimes those books can be in conversation with each other. To me, this was an earth shattering concept, helped by the fact that shortly after seeing this video I experienced this phenomena not once, but twice!

Some of you may remember last month when I reviewed The Broposal by Sonora Reyes and Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devon Price in the same video. I did this because I read these two books at the same time and truly felt as though they were speaking to both myself and each other. Unmasking Autism is a non-fiction book which outlines the challenges of being diagnosed with autism as an adult and the many ways that autism can show up in adults, especially those ways that are outside the very narrow way that autism is portrayed in the media. 

The Broposal, on the other hand, is a gay rom-com following two characters, one who is autistic, as they decide to get fake married to keep one of them from being deported, while also dealing with an absolutely evil ex-girlfriend. To add another layer to this delicious bookish cake, I myself was going through my autism diagnosis as I read these two books. 

What transpired was that I was reading a book which was helping me to understand my Autism in one hand, while reading a book with a character I could relate to in the way that they existed with Autism in the real world with the other hand. I don’t necessarily want to call this a spiritual experience, but that seems to be the best word for it in my head right now. It’s definitely a strange feeling though, picking up two books that seem completely different and then having them fit so perfectly together. After all, I had no idea that the Broposal featured an Autistic main character when I picked it up and decided to read it. So in many ways it felt a bit like fate that I not only read both, but read them at the same time. It was as though they were MEANT to be read together. 

Then, to my surprise, this happened AGAIN! Last week I posted a video comparing Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson with Magic’s Pawn by Mercedes Lackey. The common theme this time? Depression.

Something in the Woods Loves You is a nonfiction memoir chronicling Anderson’s ongoing battle with depression, following his darker times along with his pursuit of treatment. In the book, he often walks in nature, discovering the ways that animals behave and likening them to his own existence. In this way, he portrays animals and nature as guides who can help us understand our own lives and the natural world better. We also follow his challenges in going to therapy and working to move past his depression, ultimately realizing that depression isn’t something that can be cured, but rather something that can be survived and something that can be made less terrible through a lot of hard work. 

In Magic’s Pawn, the first book of the Last Herald Mage trilogy, we follow Vanyel, a young man destined to inherit his kingdom, but one who really just wants to leave it all behind and become a bard. His predicament is made even worse by the fact that he is gay, which of course his father and the rest of the world are not one bit happy about. Vanyel is horribly depressed and every chapter of the story seems to introduce something new and awful into his life. I will mention that the book deserves a huge trigger warning as he more than once considers, or even attempts to take his own life. 

Reading these two books together still felt like a three way conversation but in a very different way. Something in the Woods seemed to be showing me, a person who has lived with depression my whole life, that there is hope and beauty and reasons to keep going. Whereas Magic’s Pawn very much felt like putting a depressed character through the ringer to see just how much they could endure. My initial reaction to this was fairly negative. It reminded me a lot of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, which very much feels like a book built on shock value and trauma porn. 

But I think it’s also important to consider the time period of Magic’s Pawn’s release. Coming out in 1989, the book would have coincided with the peak of the AIDs epidemic, a time when gay literature was very rarely filled with joy as illness, death and loss were seemingly permanent fixtures of the community at that time. Realizing this helped me to understand Magic’s Pawn a bit more. Going through hell and surviving no longer felt like shock for shock’s sake like A Little Life, but instead felt more like a story about triumph over terrible odds and a world that has turned its back on you. Does that mean I’m ready to dive back in and read the rest of the trilogy? Ehhhh, maybe not, but I think it helped me to understand and appreciate the book on a much deeper level. 

I’ve come to really love this idea of books talking to each other. It’s something I now secretly hope to experience more. I think it really just adds a whole layer of nuance and complexity to the way I read and think about books. It’s easy to forget that books don’t just appear in this world fully formed. They are written by real people existing in the same world as us, but perhaps in very different circumstances.  It’s the reason I think uplifting marginalized authors is so important and also the reason I think it’s insane to “separate the art from the artist” as if the artist goes into creating without any of their preconceived notions, experiences or biases. I think discovering books which seemingly speak to each other allows us to think even deeper about the words on the page, who wrote them, and what they mean to us as we read them. And that’s pretty awesome if you ask me!

Have you ever read two books that felt like they were talking to each other? Please share!

Towards the end of 2024 I was in a rough spot. Approaching two years of creating content full time I had finally hit the point where “making it up as I went” and “Planning it all in my head” and “Don’t worry, everything is under control” finally exploded, leaving me stressed, anxious and burnt out. I think when projects begin as big unwieldy things, it feels appropriate to make a big plan and get organized, but in my case, things had slowly escalated in a way that made it much harder for me to see the mess they were becoming. The result? I was exhausted and sad pretty much all the time.

So when 2025 began, I knew I needed to make some changes. Now I know you can actively make changes any time in the year, but I think there’s a reason we fall back on things like new years resolutions. It feels like a good time to make massive sweeping life changes. And since it is a bit of a tradition to do so, maybe we don’t feel so alone in trying new things. The thing I ended up trying that ultimately felt as though it saved my life??? 

A simple fridge calendar. 

I’ve included a photo here. Though reading my handwriting is nearly impossible, I think it will at least give you the idea of what I’ve been doing.

Starting in January, I began filling out my weeks and months with a calendar on the fridge. In doing so, suddenly everything became super visible. Right off the bat, it was apparent that the reason I was so tired was that I was doing an insane amount of work and keeping the schedule for all of it in my head, playing it on repeat multiple times a day in order to ensure I didn’t forget anything. The first thing I did when starting this calendar was to commit to creating less content, which as a content creator might sound crazy!

But consider that I was posting three, sometimes four videos a day. It was completely unsustainable, and worse yet was that with so much content, most of my videos weren’t even getting seen before a new one took its place. All that work and nearly nothing to show for it. Knowing that I needed to build my schedule in a way that allowed for videos to get some breathing room and for me to get some rest, I committed to 2 videos a day with Sundays being the exception where I would (mostly) only post one.

The other thing the calendar did was allow me to space out the different types of content I create. Many of you know that I create content about Books, Boardgames and One Piece. On any given day, I felt like if I wasn’t posting about all three, I was failing. Which, as you might imagine, was not a healthy mindset. With the calendar, I was able to easily color code these things and alternate between them in a meaningful way, creating various content throughout the week and (hopefully but not always) making my different audience pockets happy!

Finally, by being able to cross things off as I did them, I was able to see the progress that was being made. I was able to feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement, something I was sorely lacking. I cannot even begin to explain how much this last part improved my mental health almost immediately. Being able to show what I’ve accomplished in a day or week has always been super important to me and the simple act of crossing out a visual to-do list turned out to be insanely helpful to me and my silly little brain. 

On the other side of that, filling out my schedule in advance also empowered me to say NO, a word I really struggle with. Nope, I can’t do a video on that day, I’ve already committed to something else, can we try another day? Nope, I don’t need to film three more things today, I’ve already accomplished my daily goals! No, I am not failing! I am doing exactly what I said I’d do today!

It’s funny how a simple thing like a fridge calendar or a journal or a to-do list or a daily affirmation can change your life for the better.  As the year goes on, I hope to find new things like this that are simple, yet effective. For example we’ve also implemented a “To-Do” shelf for games and books I need to review. This has also been a great visual for showing progress and accomplishment. And I imagine that as time goes on, we’ll find other fun and easy ways to make my work process even better. 

What sorts of things do you do to stay organized while feeling a sense of achievement in your daily life or work or both? Let me know!!

PS: I’m hoping to start doing more blogging here on Ezeekat Press, let me know if there are any topics you’d love to see me cover! And thanks for reading!!

This week I’m aboard my first cruise ever!! The joco cruise is a nerdy themed cruise that feels like a comic-con on the sea! Anyway, just wanted to say hi and to hope March is off to a good start with you!!

Today I went to a make your own pirate flag class and this was my creation.