Catgirls writing afterwards!!!!

First of all, I want to sincerely thank everyone for checking RiverLight out! For me, this book represented me proving to myself I could still finish a project after life ruined any chance of me finishing my entry for the previous contest. Back in the day, I would be like, “what, 45k? Easy!” I did that in like one and a half months during the first contest.

But ever since then it felt like things just got harder and harder, I couldn’t imagine myself making something with the scope of RiverLight, especially in just three months.

When they announced this new contest, I felt like this was my chance. Isekai, 50 thousand words minimum word count, one prompt, it felt like this was THE contest for me.

That didn’t keep RiverLight from having its own challenges, though, what doesn't? Yet now here I stand with an entry I can be proud of, and I’ve proven to myself that no matter what life throws at me if I put the pedal to the metal, I can still put out stuff.

I want to give the biggest thanks I can to everyone who checked out my book, and those who've pushed me to go on when several times throughout the contest period I wanted to hang up the hat. I remember waking up one day and checking Steward’s countdown timer and seeing I was 10 thousand words behind schedule! I thought I was a goner, yet here I stand with a finished book.

I want to give a special shoutout to Claudia. To put it bluntly, 2025 has absolutely fucking sucked for me, yet she’s the only reason I can proudly stand here with a finished product I can be proud of.

She’s the one that pushed me to push out chapter after chapter and never give up. I don’t know where this book would be without her encouraging me at every step of the way, but it certainly wouldn’t be finished and on time. I can say that much.

Riverlight, for me, felt like returning home after a long trip abroad. Back in the day when I joined Honeyfeed, Isekai was what I lived for. It was most of what I read, most of what I watched, I couldn’t imagine myself consuming anything else. Yet as time went on I found myself drifting away from the genre that originally got me into writing. It's been four whole years since I last wrote my last pure isekai, and in that time, I got a lot of ideas that only now have had the chance to come to fruition.

For Riverlight I really wanted to almost vent about how this year has been, and for me Rin was a large part of that anger. He’s closed off, regretful, wishes he could destroy the world around him, but is too lazy to even attempt such a thing. If it wasn’t for Lilly, he would have spiraled out of control years before the story began. For me I felt like he really encapsulated a lot of how this year has been, that regret of not being able to do things differently, even if so much of it wasn’t your fault, and how sometimes it feels like luck just isn't ever on your side.

So again, thanks to everyone who read this fair, and with that, Riverlight comes to a close!