Hello everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a chapter so I figured I’d put up a status update to keep people informed. Don’t worry it’s not because I’ve stopped working on Daybreak or anything.
I had originally hoped to post chapter 18 in June but two major reasons (in addition to just life being busy) caused it to be delayed.
The first is that the laptop that I’ve been using to write the draft suddenly died on me due to a critical harddrive failure. Normally, when a computer starts developing problems I take more precautions to make sure any content I have on it is backed up. However this time, the failure came out of nowhere for a laptop that I only started using January of this year, and I lost more than a half chapter of draft. Some more mistakes happened when I tried to rewrite this based on my memories and needless to say, this set me back several weeks.
The second is that after I finished chapter 18 and pushed it into beta, I had some… dissatisfactions from on what the beta-readers thought of it. I’ve since decided to write out another chapter before the original chapter 18, to better flesh out the contents of some of the scenes in hopefully giving it more impact. This means what I originally planned for chapter 18 will end up being chapter 19 instead, and I certainly don’t want to release this out-of-order.
The good news is that the new chapter 18 is coming along quickly and I’m fairly hopeful in releasing it within two weeks. The chapter after that (which I need to revisit given the new content which doesn’t need to be told a second time) should be released soon after if not back-to-back.
Well that’s all I can say for now as I really don’t want to spoil any of the coming chapters. Hope everyone is enjoying their summer!
Best regards
~ Aorii
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Aw man that sucks- i can’t deal with hard drive failures- have you tried forensics to recover it? Or is it completely dead unless you pay someone?
It’s so completely dead the mere attempt to transfer files off it was causing issues so… yeah.
I discovered recently that I lost more than I thought, as a bunch of documents I use for taxes, my resume, etc. were on there :<
Hey, I always wanted to write you a long comment but never came to it. So, I’m writing this short one in the meantime.
As an avid reader and hobby writer myself I must say that you’re working on one of my most favourite fictions to date. Although there were always some nitpicks, I never felt the urge to write them, as they were really subjective preferences on what details I’m interested in and which I’d rather had kept secret. Simply, there is little to criticize so I’ll jump to the good things.
I love how the characters in your story act. They are beautifully consistent and humanly hypocritical at the same time, forming politics and drama wherever they go, without them feeling stupid. One can get from which perspective each character comes, even if those perspectives are overly traditional, exotic or wholly foreign to our modern morals.
I love how you made a non-traditional character and story and sticking to it till the end. You’ve taken a premise and continuously expanded on it without damaging what made the start of the story interesting.
Big applause for making a specialist character and keeping them specialized. We got some alternate history to draw parallels to and a special perspective. That’s all Kaede got and needs to stand out in her area. All else is pure effort.
Cheers,
Sincerely,
Me
Hey, thank you for leaving the feedback and I’m glad you’ve been enjoying the story and its characters!
I do encourage you to comment on the nitpicks if you have the time =) Whether or not I agree with them, I think they’d at least be interesting perspectives to consider!
I do still think the beginning of Daybreak hampers it somewhat, not in terms of storytelling (starting from schooling definitely a lot of depth/growth opportunities to the characters) but rather in terms of managing genre/reader expectations (which I was never good at to begin with). A topic I’ll write about later is that I do plan to do a “soft reset” after volume 4 is finished, as vol5 will be written so that people can pick it up as their first volume in their story.
Funny enough, I actually consider Kaede the least ‘specialized’ of all the characters in the cast. I literally describe her as a ‘factotum’ in my character sheets.
Regarding Kaede, I think, I failed to specify what I mean.
Indeed in the story she takes the place of a more balanced, by modern standards healthy, personality. Especially in comparison to all our beloved prince-lings, princesses, and war hawks this comes to shine.
I failed to put what I originally said in my larger experience with Isekai. In the typical “into another world” genre, most main characters start with one gimmick which makes them “special”, “better than the inhabitants”. Their edge over this foreign and unfair world so to speak. In this sense I wanted to refer to Kaede’s expertise / interest in history as her specialization. Of course now that I think about it, you really do a good job of giving her this detail, without making it all what she’s about. She’s way to complex to just reduce to “good at history”. So lets say she specialized in being Kaede. All her character and past experience is her advantage against this world.
What I’ve mean with keeping her “specialized” was less about her having only one skill and more about (in my opinion bad) development in common Isekai. Often the main character starts with one skillset and the author manages keep it consistent for some chapters. After the author adds more skills. Unfortunately this has the tendency to dilute the character instead of making them more interesting. All nuance these characters had at the beginning of a novel is getting outpaced by the powercreep. Alas this surely also has to do with the tendency for web-publications to become power-fantasies and the like. But that won’t prevent me from noting it.
Now back to your work. I think its evident – also from various critiques you’ve received – that you’re not writing the usual fantasy story. And that’s already a big plus in my opinion. I think you’re effort shines through in all the nuance I can see in your writing. Also I’m very much for character growth and the like. Like you’ve already did, the story breathes through the many scenes we’re Kaede struggles to align present reality with her past ideals and preferences. What I especially like is how she has certain ideas and plans, but its pascals expertise which turns them into reality. (Like the unfortunate example of the nuke)
Apologies once again for the late reply. I’ve been crazy busy with work of late and forgot to check back at the site.
Daybreak actually originally started as a short-story parody on how LN protagonists with special powers or broken abilities get so much special treatment, not only from the setting, by even from audiences, when we ignore some of their blatant abuse of their special status over other characters. Hence Kaede begins as a nobody with no powers, no status, not even the rights of a citizen, and completely under Pascal’s authority/control. So of course Kaede doesn’t have much that makes her “special” except her own interests and hobbies. Personally, I actually wish I could’ve expand Kaede’s skill set a bit to include things like psychology so I could more easily explore issues in that realm (from veteran PTSD to Sylv’s bipolar disorder) but alas, Kaede is a teenager and I want to keep her reasonable. She does of course gain experiences over the course of the series (from learning to ride like a sack of potatoes to the basics of command and leadership). Plus, I do keep “character sheets” of most major characters simply to make sure the growth of their skills is reasonable to their experiences.
What defines Kaede about all isn’t her fascination with history but the fact she enjoys exploring different perspectives, which is sadly something seriously undervalued in our modern world. Thus, Kaede is what I call a “true xenophile”.
“Society is built upon the specialization of labor” is a phrase I love to use. I’ve always believed that the more knowledgeable people are, the less they realize they truly know about a topic; and only geniuses and idiots think they can do everything themselves. Furthermore, to paraphrase the advice a friend/coworker once gave me: ‘leadership is about delegation. I may be able to do X better than the people below me. But if I did it myself, then I am taking away from them the opportunity and potential experience and expertise that they could have gained’. And Kaede is very much walking the road of leadership.
Have you ever considered traditional book publishing? What about have manga or anime be created from it?
lol I don’t live in Japan so definitely not the latter.
I keep thinking I’ll try submitting it to publishers at some point but… (shrug) so far I keep finding myself lacking the time to do that.
Big aspect of this is that writing Daybreak is enjoyable to me, all the other aspects surrounding a story (marketing or trying to publish) is not.
And well, at least based on reaction from various sites I’ve posted it to, it feels like Daybreak is not the type of story that most readers are looking for.
Technology; it’s a wonderful thing when it works. 😑
Happy to hear from you regardless, looking forward to the next release.
Another happy day.
Thank you for the update.