I'm not entirely sure what I should be writing here so I will start by saying thank you for reading this. Nearly 3 years ago when I first started working on this, I felt like I knew far, far more about writing than I actually did. Now, having arrived at the end I realize that I'm just standing at the base of a mountain and that there is far more that I have to learn in order to meet my own expectations for "good" writing. Regardless of my own opinion on this work, it is certainly something that I doubt I'll forget for a long time. It's truly been an adventure.
There are somethings I think I probably should talk about since I did have some rather long delays between chapters (a whole year lol). Before getting into those though I'd like to get the simple stuff out of the way.
The first thing is that I have been reading all of the comments and reviews, whether they were on reddit, , or AO3. I definitely was not the best at responding to them, but I did read them. So, for this chapter I'm going to make sure to respond to anything that gets asked. If there was something that either didn't make sense, constructive criticism, or if you want to fight me outside then feel free to ask away. Just please remember that I cannot respond to reviews; if you're on you need to DM me or go to another platform (if you want me to respond).
The next thing I wanted to cover are some of the stats from my word processor regarding the work that went into this. While I certainly haven't been locked away in some moldy room hammering away at this 24/7 since February 2021, but I also wasn't just cranking out a chapter an afternoon (like I did with Re:Hangover). Also, I'm not going to figure out how to format a table that'll work on and AO3 so please bear with what's below.
Chapter Word Count Time (Hours)
1 6528 37
2 4332 10
3 4304 8
4 14241 39
5 10273 45
6 8445 29
7 13658 50
8 21792 43
9 18449 64
10 14702 37
11 14967 37
12 11759 30
13 31543 116
14 16346 53
15 30753 72
16 39015 89
17 78078 502
Total 339185 1261
So TL:DR in case you either don't like reading tables or if the formatting is too fucked, it took a really long time.
The last thing I want to talk about here is both the inspiration for the story and why there was such a long gap between chapter 16 (released on February 26th 2022) and chapter 17 (released on December 17th 2023).
I've tried to write this part a few times. Its difficult to convey what I need to say coherently without oversharing. So I'm going to intentionally leave things a short and vague.
This story more or less became an outlet for my less than positive emotions. There was a plan, but things ended up getting changed as I went along so that it could continue to serve the purpose I needed it to. This would be why Emilia's sections ended up getting dragged out so much.
The big break happened because things ended up improving for me. I was feeling happier, and I was busier with finishing up my final year of university. I ended up coming back because of a sense of obligation to finish this, and a bit of a nosedive in my own personal life. However things are back to at least being manageable now.
To bring things back to writing, there are still stories I want to tell. I have a few ideas that popped up over the past few years that I couldn't touch until I finished this. I hope that I can take what I've learned here and apply it to my future work.
While I'm not going to jump right into my next project, and once I start it its definitely going to be something short this has thankfully not turned into the goodbye like I thought it might not too long ago.
So, to put a lid on all this rambling, once again thank you for reading and I hope you'll join me again in the future.
Sincerely,
Strandenstein
