Author's Afterword (Complete)
Author's Afterword (Complete)
It's complete!
Finally, it's finished.
The main story, the epilogue, and even the side stories—all of it!
Finishing my first work like this leaves me with some regrets, but it also feels like a new beginning.
I mentioned this once before in an author's note.
I was what you'd call a "prologuer."
The planning for <Makamulli> itself started in June of '21. That was when Aether was created, when Kleis was created, and when I settled on the academy genre. But it was July of '22 when it finally saw the light of day.
The number of scrapped opening sections during that time reached about thirty. That's how reluctant I was to show my writing to anyone.
Even so, I finally decided to just go for it and uploaded the first chapter.
And in the end, I made it all the way here.
It was a good choice. Luck was on my side as well.
There were regrettable parts and lacking parts, but the fact that I reached a completion holds deep meaning. They say writing improves the more you do it. It makes me wonder why I didn't put that truth into practice all that time.
At the same time, I'm already feeling the sadness of parting.
I originally planned to write more side stories. Things like Aether doing online streaming, campus life, various comic dialogues, and so on.
I condensed and condensed those as much as possible, so the latter half of the side stories ended up short and punchy.
As I mentioned in the author's note, I did this because of personal commitments in July and August.
During those two months, I physically won't have time to write. Yet I couldn't very well go on a long hiatus when the story was so close to completion.
What's more, this was originally a work I'd planned to finish even sooner.
First, it was 150 chapters, then between 200 and 250, then 300... I set a final defensive line at 360, and it broke through.
If it goes past 400, it feels like it'll really hit 500. A hundred chapters turned out to fill up much faster than I thought.
So, while it's truly, truly regrettable to me personally, I've decided to end Aether's story here.
My next work will likely be possible after September.
I have several projects I'm conceptualizing. If I pull out only the ones with a basic plot in place and arrange them by serialization priority, they look like this:
1. Ruffian + Space Opera + Academy
2. TS + Romance of the Three Kingdoms + Wuxia + Pure Romance
3. Villain + Doctor + Modern + Psychic Powers
4. Time-Limited + Cyberpunk + Biopunk + Fantasy
Here, number 2, the TS story, has the 'pure romance' tag attached.
As some readers may know, I originally never stated the romantic route in my TS stories. I didn't like doing so. I believed that adding a romance tag to a TS story ruined the thrill of the buildup and halved the reader's interest in the work.
However, as time passed and I encountered various cases, my thinking changed.
From the perspective of putting myself in someone else's shoes, if I were 200 chapters into a novel without an NTR tag, and then an NTR scene suddenly appeared in chapter 201, my own stomach would churn. That's what I thought.
So, for TS stories with a clear romantic route, I plan to include the relevant tags from now on.
Therefore, unlike Makamulli, that Three Kingdoms TS story is planned to have real romance elements, and the plotted outline is about 200 chapters long. But seeing how this work turned out, it might just end up going to 400 chapters as well...
Q. So, is the space opera my next work also a TS story?
A. It is not.
Since I've tried writing a TS story once, I plan to try a male protagonist this time. Though he might be a fellow who acts almost exactly like Aether. The plan is for him to be more so, if anything, and certainly not less.
Q. Then, is that one TS story listed above the only one you have in mind?
A. As of now, that's correct.
Of course, the works listed up there are the ones whose plots have undergone a fair amount of construction. If you include the ones that are just at the conceptual stage, there are many more—TS or not. I hope the day comes when I can show you all of these someday.
Now then, let's wrap things up.
Dear readers.
Thank you for loving <The Magic Academy's Physicist> all this time.
To those who followed along in real time for a span of a year.
To those who binge-read it.
To those who supported me with coins.
To those who drew wonderful and cute fan art.
And even to our managing PD.
Thank you, everyone, so much!
This is truly the end. It's a farewell for a short while, but I promise I'll be back soon.
Until then, stay healthy, and I wish you happiness.
Thank you!!
- AiBi