There's one very specific piece of feedback I was given by multiple people that messaged me that I'd like to address.
I upset a few people because I didn't include a content warning for that chapter and the discussion of suicide; more specifically, the idea that it can be something empowering or something one can find comfort in. Someone even said they were going to stop reading because I was somehow glorifying suicide.
Glorifying suicide is not my intent at all. It's hard to put into words, but all I can do is share my own experience and relationship with that concept to try and explain it better.
I mentioned in my first post that I had a neck injury when I was young (a few years younger than Hisao) and that writing this story was helping me get through some baggage from back then. This is part of that.
When I woke up in the hospital, I couldn't feel anything below my neck. And when I say I couldn't feel anything, I don't mean like "my lip is numb from the dentist" or "I slept on my arm wrong." People take the sensation of touch for granted. It doesn't just let you feel things in a physical sense - it's the constant biofeedback you get from your body just existing in three dimensional space and it's gone. When that gets cut off so abruptly, and you're in traction so you can do nothing but stare at the ceiling, there's a part of you that wonders if you even exist, and being stuck this way is what eternity is going to be like...and how long you can hold on to your sanity like that. (The massive concussion, near drowning, and cornucopia of sedatives and morphine they had me on didn't help much either, but I digress.) And the most terrifying part about it is you can't even kill yourself to end it.
No matter how bad things get, no matter how many things you lose control over, suicide is the one thing you still have control over. It's a horrible thing to latch on to but once you get to that point, you're looking for anything to keep your head above water and it is the absolute last thing that can keep you afloat.
It's not the idea of killing yourself that you take comfort in, it's the sense of agency the ability to make a choice gives. It can create a stepping stone to other small things - if I have control over something...what else do I have control over? Can I control my reaction to the things I find uncontrollable? Yes. Every success builds off the previous one, with suicide being the cornerstone - something that can look incredibly alarming or wrong to other people (like therapists...)
Realizing I didn't even have that, it was the most hopeless I've ever been in my life. Nothing else I've experienced has even come close. Saki's terror is my own.
I did start to get better...but for the first few weeks of therapy, my motivation was to get strong enough to be able to kill myself. I needed to regain control of that. A month into therapy, I reached that point. And it's still a fundamental part of who I am, nineteen years ago next week. Every day I don't kill myself is a day I'm actively choosing to live, and that can become an incredible source of inner strength. In the last two decades, there were times when everything felt like it was stripped to that foundation again, but it's something that has never failed me when I need it.
That's the sentiment of what I was trying to convey, of suicide being empowering...but I realize that suicide can be a very touchy subject and people can have different - yet no less primal - reactions to it being brought up.
That being said, I may put a warning near the table of contents if it ends up being an upsetting issue for more people, however I will not be doing any individual warnings on a chapter basis (excepting smut chapters for obvious reasons)
Ah well, enough yapping from me. Two things to report!
First: The Act 4 outline is pretty much finished, with enough wiggle room. I hope ya'll are gonna like it.
Before I can flesh out Act 4 and start writing it in earnest, I'm going to go back over the next week or two and do some editing of the story. I'm laid up with a bad infection so I'm running out of excuses to avoid sitting down and writing.
No, this isn't Learning To Fly: True Edition, but re-reading it a few years on makes me realize there are a lot of grammar and sometimes spelling mistakes that made it through. I'm not changing the story or adding in extra chapters or characters but there's parts that could be edited to be a *lot* smoother than they are right now.
There's also some inconsistencies in events relating to each other that I want to go back and clear up.
Second: NEW ART BEING WORKED ON
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