>>1405404>horror vacuiI see what you mean now, and there are worse offenders among the pages I haven't posted. I think my fear of whitespace comes from wanting to make something distinct from the usual 6x9 paperback with no distinguishing features. That and the magazine I'm pulling from is generally full-colour maximalism, and I'm afraid of being called a loser if I can't get some visual edge in this thing. Parallel to that is a fear of making this thing over-processed, and wanting to keep some simplicity and consistency to the design; these flash fiction snippets are hard to work with, though, and I don't want to just slap them mid-page.
Here's a two-page spread with Tomboy again, old (top) versus new (bottom), where I tried to lean into the whitespace more in the bottom left page. It also seems to help break up the homogeneity of those two pages.
There are also some pages that are considerably more sparse, so I'll try to place those judiciously. Namely the titlepages for longer pieces (which are otherwise generally more homogeneous in the layout of their writing); they tend to be more "open", and it's my plan to use those pieces akin to chapter bookends. I've also imposed a soft limit of 100 pages for myself, which is approximately where I'm at now.
This thing is like a well of neurosis for me.
