Volume One Afterword

Greetings, everyone!

Thank you so very much for taking the time to read through the first volume of Love ; alone. From the bottom of my heart, I’m so grateful.

I’ve been working on this story for over two decades, writing and rewriting ever since I was in middle school. Maybe the fact that I started this in my middle school days shows, but hopefully you will also see the value in a story that was dreamt up by a middle schooler and what it turned into after two decades of revisions.

This is a story that is very close to my heart; I wanted to finally write the story that the little middle schooler me would have adored.

Honestly she had a lot of amazing ideas and wonderful plots that I can say that I didn’t have to change everything completely. They’re still hers, I just expanded on them and tried to polish it all up.

While writing, I decided to break some of the common writing rules a bit. I’m ADHD so I intended for a lot of these changes to make it much easier for me to reread it while editing it. I decided to leave it this way to extend that accessibility to others. Hopefully this is really easy for you to read.

As for the story itself, I wanted to focus on bringing us into morally gray areas. Thinking is not always black and white and there are always going to be people who think very differently from how we do. To them, that’s just normal thinking. This resulted in a story with a lot of deliberation on who is right and wrong, I think. I don’t want to focus on right and wrong, though, only people living their lives with views that came from the events that shaped their lives. That isn't to say I condone their words or actions.

Actually, I had quite a lot of trouble getting into Mattathias’ character in order to write him. With the thought that I wanted to create a yandere character who slowly descends into madness, I had to change up my thinking a lot. He’s kind of really disturbed in ways that I don’t condone, which is what made it so difficult to get into his mind. I hope I’ve done it as much justice as I think I have, though.

Also, a fun fact: This story was originally set on earth. My younger self definitely did a lot of research into historical accuracy. I’m sorry, younger me, for throwing all that hard work out of the window!

The original pages had notes written all throughout the margins. It was just too much information to keep up with, though. I wanted more freedom for the design of the characters, fashion, and world so I changed all of it. I decided that if I wanted a moon that orbits a bigger moon, why couldn’t I just make that happen? It sounds really cool, so what shouldn’t I?

Now everyone in this book lives in a fantasy world where things like that can happen. I’m excited to show what this new fantastical world can offer!

Thank you for reading my book, again, and this afterword as well. I hope that you will continue to read it into the second volume. Volume two will be introducing some new characters and will go into what happened to the castle and siblings after the events of this volume. Please look forward to it!