[Not much of an Author's Afterword]

You may ask why does this novel end abruptly?

I have to rush for the Kadokawa contest.

I have reached the limit of what I can endure. To describe what it’s like: you keep writing and you still have ideas to write, but your body keeps telling you “that’s it, I don’t wanna write anymore, this has to finish as soon as possible”.

I spent 17 days of my life, writing in a language I don’t have a deep appreciation of. I cranked out countless sentences that don’t seem to match the ideas of what I meant. Sentences that seem more like filling the blank spaces of a notebook just so I can transform my ideas into the form of a novel. Words with wrong intended meanings. Blah blah..

There’s nothing worse than writing a Japanese isekai, using the English language, as somebody whose native language isn’t even English.

Writing this novel is some of the most nightmarish experiences I have ever had in my entire life. The longer do I keep writing, the more it feels like I’m losing touch with the English language itself.

If I have so many issues with the English language, why do I use it to write a novel then? Other than the reasons you can guess (feel free to), it’s really hard to say why without talking about stuff personal to me. I’m happy to let personal drama out, but I doubt this is an appropriate place to do that. Let me just say that my own language is poorly equipped to write a supposed Japanese isekai. (But actually is there any language that isn’t poorly equipped to imitate what the Japanese language can do at all?)

What I wanted to do with this novel… I don’t really have many clues. I just want to write something involving a motif I have always been a sucker of, but have yet to see anybody produce such a work with it before (except for one with a reversed gender role). I don’t know how to spell it out, the gist of that motif I have written in chapter 25. To try to badly phrase it out: Boy love girl, girl loves boy, boy tries hard but gets mistreated and unrecognized, girl sides with others out of tough love, then by the time boy sapped himself girl feels regrets and decided that she’s not gonna side with other people anymore. Variations occur from here.

Another motif is that the girl feigns caring attitude toward the boy, until it’s exposed she’s doing it out of obligation or something, but then ultimately she actually does love him more than she loves to admit! This is another guilty favorite motif of mine.

Given the two motifs, you may guess that I have planted a lot of seeds for them which have ended up being executed badly, or ideas abandoned. You find many portions of the novel weird or out of nowhere? Well, Roselyn was supposed to be one of those girls who sided with Ryle, alongside Caterina of course, while Regina was trying (pretending) to act like some respectable Queen/Princess. I wanted to write more about how Regina mistreated Ryle when he was a soldier, like deep down she loves him a lot but still gives him maximum punishment, meanwhile giving a blind eye to others like Paul.

One subsidiary comment: I wanted the novel to be much more risque than currently. But I was afraid that sort of stuff could cross the boundary of what’s considered as NSFW. Well, I was really proud of the netorare bait chapter, although that’s already enough to make me fear for criteria disqualification.

There’s a lot of dialogues could have been written between Alina and Ryle. Although a lot of them could be very bland.

The novel is sort of a tribute to many of the things I have read and watched. Don’t know if you find any of them familiar somewhere.

It’s really hard to write multiple character perspectives at once. It’s not as easy as some may love to think. Works that tried to do that all end up having trade-offs. Plot holes abound here and there.

I don’t really have much to say in this afterword. I can see the issues my own novel has. But then again, seeing and being able to execute well are two different things. Feel like I’m excusing myself for the flaws of the novel. Lots of them grave flaws.

Hard to say more without saying more personal stuff, which I doubt people want to read.

But well… make anything out of this novel as you want to. I consider it an unfinished prototype I would love to see in a more perfect form some day (never sadly).

It’s a novel embedded with the ideas I love.

I guess I’m really making lots of excuses.

But then again even if I apologize for them, I don’t have much to say anyway…