Afterword
HELLO, EVERYONE! This is your author, Necoco.
Thank you very much for purchasing Reincarnated as a Dragon Hatchling Volume 12! I’m amazed that we’ve managed to publish a total of twelve volumes so far. I feel like I say this in every afterword, but every time the number goes up, I’m always in awe of how far we’ve come. At this point, we’ve published a total of around 1.7 million letters. Including the new bonus stories, I think the total is over 1.8 million.
In the early days of the Dragon Hatchling series, I was asked by a publisher to estimate how many characters my story would have. I surprised myself when I said “probably about a million.”
There aren’t many light novel series that can publish over ten volumes, so looking back on it now, it feels like I was being a little too ambitious. But the series has ended up growing much longer than I expected. I’m sure I’ll hit two million characters before too long.
I once heard a professional manga artist say that they prepare two to three ending points in their series so they can finish their work at a time that makes sense depending on the series’ popularity. I understood the allure of doing something like that, but I feel like I wouldn’t be able to plan that far in advance and still have the ending turn out as good as I want…
Some of the details of the setting and characterization have changed throughout the writing process, but still, it looks like I’ll be able to complete this work with the ending I initially conceived.
And of course, that’s thanks to all of the readers who have been buying Dragon Hatchling and supporting me along this journey. Thank you so much!
The first part of the manga adaptation of Dragon Hatchling (which includes contents up to the second volume) is nearing its completion. It’s been almost five years since I wrote that part of the story. Personally, I’m looking forward to the manga’s updates with both a sense of nostalgia and excitement about its fresh take on my story. I’m sure that many readers feel the same way.
Hmm… I guess I still have some room to write a bit more in my afterword. Every time I write it, I’m struck with the realization that I’m not great at writing afterwords. To be honest, I feel like few authors are. But it always takes me five times as long to write the afterword as it does to write the same length of the actual novel, so I feel like I’m one of the worst in that respect. Honestly, if it were just a one-shot novel, I might have a lot more to say, but…after twelve volumes, I feel like I’ve run out of things to say…
Of course, there are light novel series that are over fifty volumes long. I wonder what their afterwords are like? Maybe I should collect every volume of one of those series and compare the afterwords in each. I’m sure the authors of those say the same things over again in multiple volumes, just like me.
Let’s see…I’ve still got a bit of space left, so I’ll delve into a little bit more of the hidden side of producing a series like this. I’m sure a lot of people would be put off by such a detailed discussion of the series’ production, but those people probably wouldn’t bother reading the series afterwords anyway, right?
I mean, from the other eleven afterwords, they probably don’t think they’re missing much…
Anyway, despite the light novels being part of a continuous series, I tried to break up each volume at a point where its contents feel somewhat coherent. I don’t worry too much about the word count. But thankfully, when I finished, I found that the word count was pretty even across the board, which made it pretty easy to separate them into different volumes.
As I recall, Dragon Hatchling Volume 3 was somewhat difficult because I needed to significantly cut down the number of words, but that was only difficult because I had to adjust the dialogue and expression without reducing the number of scenes.
Other than that, there were really no major difficulties with word counts.
…Until now, that is.
The conclusion of the Lilyxila arc, which began in Volume 10, was too long to be crammed into two volumes and too short to take up three volumes. There was no good solution. But if it was going to be a pain either way, I wanted to do the option that required cutting out fewer scenes, so I decided the Lilyxila arc would take up Volumes 10, 11, and 12. It’s quite stressful for me to decide which sentences to cut out to meet a word count; if I wrote it, I thought it was necessary!
To be honest, I wanted to end Volume 12 with Lilyxila’s death and save the conversation with the Divine Voice for Volume 13, but that would’ve cut the word count for Volume 12 in about half, so I opted to put the contact with the Divine Voice in this volume. Because of these extenuating circumstances, the bonus stories in this volume ended up being over 18,000 characters long…
Please don’t tell anyone who hasn’t read the afterword!
This was one of those volumes that made me realize that I needed to be a little smarter about word count while writing. With a series this long, detailed plans are everything! I hope my loyal readers will take a lesson from Necoco’s handbook and learn from my mistakes.
—NECOCO
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