Almost a week after our failure to realize our bold and reckless dream of making 600 books in a day, the evidence of our hubris remains, sprawled across our workspace like the crumbling ruins of a once-great empire.

I spent all day Wednesday trimming, folding, punching holes, and inserting binding wire.

I passed the time by streaming episode after episode of Grey’s Anatomy, Season 7 on Netflix.

How better to complement an endless succession of mechanical repetition than with an endless succession of emotional repetition? Let’s just say it helped to pass the hours.

Eventually, I was finished with my part of the process, leaving stacks of neatly-piled books awaiting the final step of the binding process. Which, apparently, only Robbi is qualified to perform.

But Robbi refuses to bind until she is done illustrating Volume 32, a book that doesn’t seem to want to be finished. I’d like to blame her for the ongoing torment of those stacks and stacks of books, but she’s pregnant and uncomfortable and it’s mean to blame a pregnant, uncomfortable person who is trying her best to illustrate your manuscript.

And so I blame Don. That’s right, Don. Our Sub-Commander of Peripheral Idiocy, selfless bookbinder, and bringer of cheesecake is hereby at fault for my misery.

I’m sure you noticed that the two stacks of paper in my hands are not the same. The one on the left has been properly “punched,” meaning it has the row of small, square holes needed to accommodate the wire binding. The stack on the right does not, a fact I did not discover until attempting to bind this book and being rudely rebuffed by the stack of paper.

What does it all mean? That in spite of correctly punching 299 copies of this book. Don messed one of them up. And like the princess and the pea, I cannot tolerate even the slightest discomfort when it comes to making books.

And yet I must endure. Perhaps the unbound books are some sort of metaphor, a puzzle I am meant to unravel, a thing meant to make me stronger.

Or possibly kill me.