Aug 17, 2023
Thank you as always for reading and your feedback. You were far too kind, and you were not the only one to say you felt this was an improvement over my last entry, but personally, Cat-Eared Mage remains my favorite thing I've written.
To answer your question. They're in their mid-to-late twenties. Chika got isekai'd as a high schooler, and it's been nine years since.
It is definitely short, and I agree, breakneck. Some of that, as you alluded to, was unavoidable due to my schedule, but most of it was poor planning on my part. Given the chapter length recommendation, I really wanted to practice writing shorter chapters, but I was never able to get the hang of it. I would keep writing chapters in my usual 2k-4k length, and then spend as much time cutting them down as I did writing. Not only did it take a lot longer to write this way, but it affected the pace of the novel. If I hadn't done so, I probably would have ended up with something at least twice as long. But by the time I realized it was a mistake, I didn't have enough time left to start over.
You can actually see the moment where I start to panic. It's the chapter with the sudden marriage proposal. I realized I needed to kick the story into even higher gear, get to the minimum word count, and finish. Once I knew I would make the contest deadline, I could then see if I could find time to do another pass, slowing the pace, adding additional chapters. I've made some progress… but I suspect I won't make it before the deadline.
As I mentioned in some other comments, I also think the perspective wasn't as good an idea as I thought it was. Chika's the more interesting character, but Thelian doesn't get to see all her exploits. Part of that is, again, for brevity's sake. I figured I could lean on readers' knowledge of isekai tropes for them to fill in the break. You don't need to see Chika win over Nalindra or Thelian's Dad, because similar scenes have been written hundreds of times in other isekai novels. It's like how Star Wars Episode 7 relied on everyone already knowing the story from the original trilogy, so they could take a lot of plot shortcuts and not explain things, but if it were your first Star Wars movie, you'd be completely lost.
