Afterword

Afterword

 

THANK YOU SO MUCH for buying Volume 2 of Reincarnated as a Dragon Hatchling. It pains me to admit it, but I didn’t realize I had to write an afterword for every book until just now. For some reason I thought I just had to do it for the first one, but apparently that’s not the case!

I have a hard time figuring out what I should write here. It makes me feel a bit shy to say things like, “You should interpret this part this way!” or “I want you to feel this way when you read it!” or something like that, so I never know what to write. And it’s not like I can talk about how my friend wanted to see a particular picture so I cut it out of our junior high yearbook, or how I tripped one rainy morning on the way to high school and showed up covered in blood.

I have a feeling I’ll be thinking the same kinds of things in my afterword for the third volume, so please just keep in mind that I’m trying my best to fill up space and keep your expectations low.

I picked up several books to get an idea of how other authors write their afterwords, but they’re all pretty unique. Sometimes they’ll slap a big drawing in there for no reason to take up about ten lines of space. I thought that was a good idea, but I didn’t have the guts to try it myself. But if I really can’t think of anything to write next time, I might draw a big triangle or something and put the afterword in there. So if I go ahead and do it, you’ll know I finally took the plunge and went for it. Stay tuned!

…All right, I suppose I’ll let you in on some secrets from the author. It has to do with the biggest status screen that appeared in the second volume. I can’t let every volume get longer and longer each time, so I’ve been trying to organize the status screens a bit better…but if I don’t pay enough attention to them I don’t realize how big they’re getting. I find myself saying, “Is it just me, or are you getting bigger?”

I think it’s just difficult to write out all the skills horizontally instead of vertically, even if it means cutting down on space. It’s kind of like playing Tetris. But now I feel like I can’t go back to having everything in one narrow column. I’ll probably have to keep making a big block raining down like bullets for every status screen.

Well, if I keep adding skills, nobody’s statuses are going to get shorter. Except for Doz’s, of course. Honestly, if I keep adding at the rate I’m going, it’ll fill up an entire page. I thought about restraining myself, but I don’t want to have to change the content of the book just because of formatting restrictions, so I’m just going to keep adding more and more skills. I’ll make my goal a status screen that spans two pages next time. Bring it on, Status Screen! Common sense be damned!

Also, I’m sure you all have noticed this by now, but I added little character silhouettes at the beginning of chapters and POV shifts. Since our narrators change a few times in this volume, I wanted to make it easy for you to see who was speaking and make the reading experience as smooth as possible.

I think the silhouettes are really cool, so if you didn’t notice them before, please go back and take a look at them. Yeah, they’re really cool.

Finally, I’d like to thank my editor for always listening to my selfish requests. And I can’t thank my illustrator NAJI Yanagida enough for the absolutely beautiful illustrations.

Nervously watching the avocado tree that’s on the verge of death from my window,

—NECOCO