A Japanese middle school student’s regular class schedule usually lasted until 3:30.
Compared to Korean middle school students, whose classes ended around 4:30 on average, there was about a one-hour difference.
Then what about Japanese high school students? They also went home between 3:30 and 4:00.
School clubs were not active for no reason. They were active because students had time left over.
Of course, prestigious college-prep schools in Japan also held classes until 5:30, similar to Korea, and ran after-school college-prep groups for volunteers, actual volunteers.
But I had applied to a lower-ranked high school because I hated that.
It had nothing to do with me.
Therefore, having finished school before it was even four o’clock, I opened the front door.
A quiet house greeted me. Because no one was there.
Some people were mistaken because Saito earned so little, but Saito was, strictly speaking, a painter. He went to his studio every day and painted.
Of course, a painter whose paintings did not sell occupied a position similar to a writer whose writing did not sell, and his studio was merely a converted storage space, but separately from that, Saito was not just playing around.
So please cherish Saito, everyone.
Thank you.
I grabbed my laptop from my room, though calling it a room was vague, and went outside.
This was slightly off topic, but I always separated my work space and living space.
Anyone who had lived as a freelancer would understand, but that alone increased efficiency by nearly twofold.
Right now, I had signed a lease on a spacious apartment and even set up a separate room for work, but the family home was cramped, was it not?
So ever since money started coming into my bank account, I had used a consistent routine every year.
It was the routine of writing at a nearby café after school.
If you asked, Didn’t you say you don’t eat out…?
I cooked my meals at home myself.
I had not lied.
In truth, most Japanese students stopped by low-priced casual dining chains called family restaurants more often than cafés.
Many were open twenty-four hours, you could sit there for hours for about two hundred yen, and the drink bar was unlimited. Few places were better for staying a long time.
There was a reason Japanese creative works often showed students doing homework and studying for exams at family restaurants.
The environment was already set up for that.
Then why did I deliberately twist the cliché and go to a café?
Why else?
It was noisy.
After greeting the owner of my regular café nearby, I ordered hot chocolate, sat in a corner seat, and opened my laptop.
I placed my smartphone beside the laptop with the screen visible. I might receive an urgent message. It was one of my basic setups.
With that, every preparation was complete.
I opened a text editor.
The process up to this point was so natural that some people might think this.
Wasn’t this guy advised not to write and to rest? Why is he preparing to write as if nothing happened?
The answer to that was simple.
I believe I mentioned it before, but I did not listen to other people very well. I did what I wanted.
A few days of rest was enough.
Let us return to everyday life.
Fundamentally, I was a commercial writer. I wrote things that sold.
Since there was a culture of treating writers who did not sell as unemployed, perhaps writers had only ever existed as commercial writers to begin with.
How did a commercial writer write?
I could clearly see how other writers worked, but even so, I had never lived another writer’s life.
So I would only introduce my own method.
At present, nine months had passed since I completed my fifth work in this world, <Love Comedies Don’t Really Need Magic>.
Considering that I usually released my next work within two months of finishing one, this had been an extremely long break.
My fifth work, <Love Comedies Don’t Really Need Magic>, could be easily explained like this.
In a kind of magical realist world where no one considered magic mysterious, only the very top students could learn magic, it took years to learn even one spell, and aspiring mages were the equivalent of aspiring medical students in reality.
It was a work I wrote with the feeling of writing a love comedy about aspiring medical students.
For reference, I had so much fun that I wrote it while grinning to myself. While imagining readers reacting with, “Author, magic has nothing to do with this, though?”
My smile vanished after Yoshihiro told me the sales numbers for volume one.
Anyway.
Because of that, if I were going to write a novel, I had to write something new. Everything I had written so far was already complete.
Unless I was going to disgrace myself by writing a side story for , that was the only option.
Now that the explanation was finished, I would reveal the process by which I wrote a new work.
First, I opened an online bookstore. Then I clicked light novel under the genre categories.
Then I checked what was selling well.
School battle stories and love comedies were overwhelmingly strong, and the VRMMO genre was also enjoying explosive popularity.
Stories about being transferred to another world were visible too, but perhaps because web serials had not yet begun being published as books in earnest, their share was low.
Normally, at this point, I would have had to buy one volume each of the works I had just seen and grasp their contents as well.
However, there was no need for that now.
I had already read them.
After checking that the trending genres were the same as they had been a few days ago, I drank my hot chocolate.
Countless clues combined inside my head.
The genres currently in fashion. The popular works in those genres. The tone of those works. Their density.
Some people perceived commercial writers as people who wrote works solely to make money.
Writers who wrote only in order to sell, analyzed the popular elements of other works, and mechanically borrowed them? There were more of them than one might think.
To give the conclusion first, I also used that method. I at least had to know what sold.
Besides, I did not think it was bad.
What, was I supposed to write for self-realization instead of writing to sell?
However, I did not use only that method.
Because in the end, I was an insincere human being who could not write something I did not find fun.
There was no helping it.
Once I combined the clues obtained from market analysis, fantasies sprang up wildly in my head.
Among them, I chose the one I found fun.
The title of the work was decided in an instant.
<My Childhood Friend Isn’t Interested in Me>.
The structure of the novel was also decided.
First, the protagonist was a freshman who had just entered college.
The content would be filled with various events that occurred when that protagonist reunited at college with his childhood friend, a girl, from whom he had grown distant.
Good. Next—
Bzzzz.
At the vibration, I stopped thinking and checked beside my laptop.
[Yukimura Mai]
(Video)
How about this one? Isn’t it pretty good?
A message had come from Yukimura.
I skimmed the notes I had organized so far and turned my head over.
What had Yukimura said last time? Had she asked me to give feedback only on the acting?
I thought that was right.
Recalling Yukimura’s request, I quickly watched the roughly one-minute video.
Then I answered quickly.
[Hiiragi Touji]
It has no feeling.
Having swiftly helped Yukimura, I continued my thoughts again.
The childhood friend truly had no interest in the protagonist. She had memories with him, but no romantic feelings.
Rather than romantic feelings… what should she be interested in? Acting? No, that got deep. Novels? That got even deeper. Manga? That veered off too much.
Right. A successful career woman would be appropriate.
Now it was the protagonist’s stance.
How would the protagonist think of his childhood friend?
The protagonist could not have romantic feelings from the start. That would make the emotion too shallow.
Therefore, the protagonist’s goal and personality would be—
After thinking that far, I quietly stared at the text editor.
The things I had just recited were written haphazardly in the text editor.
After reading them intently, I clicked my tongue and placed my hands on the keyboard.
Let us go with the protagonist being dense about romance and the childhood friend having liked the protagonist since long ago.
It was the complete opposite of what I had written so far, but notes before writing were originally meant to organize the inside of one’s head. There was no need to follow them exactly.
And I had already experienced what kind of ending I would meet if I wrote according to my notes.
If I had failed four times already, I had to know by now.
Know what?
What else?
The truth that just because I found something fun did not mean other people found it fun too.
In truth, I had known that long ago, and I had honed my writing until now while believing that if I wrote well, it would be resolved.
Now, I was confused.
Whether the fun I believed in was truly fun.
Right.
This was what it meant to no longer know what fun was.
I followed what I had personally judged as popular fun and tapped away at the keyboard.
Every time I finished a sentence, I felt so bored I could die, but I endured it and completed the prologue and chapter one.
“This isn’t fun.”
Then I leaned back.
The content was obvious, and even the characters were obvious, so it was filthy boring.
Was it because it was packed full of clichés?
Why did one think clichés were clichés? Because they had been loved for a long time, they were clichés.
Therefore, clichés were not the problem.
More than that.
It was just.
It was just filthy badly written.
When I found something fun, people usually did not like it.
But did that mean people liked something if I found it boring?
If it were that simple, I would have solved my slump long ago.
When I found something boring, people found it boring too. Yoshihiro had proven that by rejecting my new work five times.
I suddenly felt wronged.
Were my tastes in consuming works that picky?
No. My tastes were not picky.
I was not fussy about genre either. There were works I had found boring in my life, but if other people liked something, I generally enjoyed it too.
Novels packed full of clichés.
Novels that did not follow clichés.
Top-popularity blockbuster films.
Art films only critics liked.
Long-running boys’ manga.
Young adult manga that ended in five volumes.
All of them.
Of course, there were differences in degree of fun. Some were fun to a level of five, and some were fun to a level of seven.
But still, if I enjoyed watching all of them, should I not be able to write all of them?
Why does my fun circuit only activate when I write something unusual?
Why in the world?
After finishing my brief lament, I sent the novel I had written today to Yoshihiro’s email.
One never knew. Maybe I was the only one who found it boring, and other people would find it fun.
If it was fun…
Did that mean I had to continue writing this?
That made the road ahead even darker, but for now, that would be better. At least I could see the answer.
I was waiting for Yoshihiro’s opinion like that when—
[Yukimura Mai]
Did I annoy you and make you angry?
A message came from Yukimura.
Hm? Was I angry?
That had never happened, so what was this?
Unable to understand, I read through the conversation I had had with Yukimura, and the answer came quickly.
[Yukimura Mai]
(Video)
How about this one? Isn’t it pretty good?
[Hiiragi Touji]
It has no feeling.
Because I had been focused, my answer had come out too curt. It was completely different from before, when I had given long feedback.
Messages did not carry voices. Looking only at that reply, it could feel like I was angry.
I picked up my smartphone to clear up the misunderstanding.
[Hiiragi Touji]
No. I was doing something else for a moment, that’s all. I do this sometimes, so don’t worry about it.
[Yukimura Mai]
I understand. So now tell me in detail.
[Hiiragi Touji]
But I don’t have anything more to say than that. It has no feeling.
After finishing my conversation with Yukimura, I put my smartphone down.
I stared blankly at the text editor, then soon closed my laptop and stood up.
I could not write anymore.
Time to go home.