Thank you all so much for the kind words. They mean a lot to me, and I really needed to hear them.
I wish I could say things are in a good place for me right now, but sadly, they aren't. About two weeks before I posted the finale, things got really bad at the escape room. In the few years through the pandemic when I didn't work for her, the boss became a raging control freak, and she didn't have a single employee over the age of twenty. The rooms were in horrible condition, which is why she hired me. I got that place fixed up to fantastic condition in less than a week. I had some medical issues I was getting treated for when she suddenly demanded that I was supposed to now work the front desk instead of being maintenance. She told me I had to cut my hair – I had a Duck Dynasty level beard that I took four years to grow and I absolutely love it, along with hair down to the base of my shoulder blades – and I refused. She fired me on the spot.
Then about a week after I posted the finale and working my gig job, I ended up breaking a front tooth. I had a crown on it from an injury about ten years ago, and it cracked underneath the gumline when I accidentally clinked it with my thermos. After a dentist appointment, I was informed that the tooth would need to be pulled since it couldn't be saved. About two weeks later (roughly two weeks ago from the time of this posting) I had the tooth removed and the healing is slower than expected. It's going to cost me almost $3k for a bridge or $5k for an implant once it fully heals in six to nine months. I'm 90% sure I'll probably go down to Mexico to get it done since I'll have to pay completely out of pocket for it.
The worst part about it is that, since I was working a customer facing job, I wanted to wear a mask to hide the fact I was missing one of my front teeth; to do this I had to trim my beard anyway and I'm still dealing with massive dysmorphia from losing both my beard and tooth. It's getting better, but if I'm being honest, I haven't been in a good headspace lately with everything that's happened. I'm learning how to talk without one of those two teeth, and after another few weeks I might be able to get a fake tooth for the space. Until then though...I'm not whole.
Maybe that's why I pushed out the finale when I did – so much was falling apart in my personal and professional life that I wanted to make sure I got one damned thing finished.
I think I'll be okay. I'm not right now, but I will be.
Anyway! To address some of the things from the final chapter and the story as a whole.
First, I tried really hard to write the graduation ceremony. I really did. After the fourth attempt I realized that I'd have to write the speeches, or describe how a high school graduation happens in Japan for something ultimately not important to the plot at all. Winding it down was the focus of the chapter.
I also debated having just the LtF characters in the finale but decided I wanted to have a brief conversation with the main cast to see how they were handling graduation, and to somewhat explore what I thought would happen with them assuming Hisao was not in their routes. The following is my own headcanon:
-Shizune and Misha have no real difference except Misha keeps her drills. Without the depression of seeing Shizune end up with Hisao, I don't think she would end up making such a drastic physical change.
-Emi would still be a ball of energy, and I ship her mom and Nurse pretty hard, so I threw something in there.
-Rin has consistently been the hardest of the main cast to write for me. Hisao pushes her into the art exhibition, but without him, I think Emi or Sae could have done the same thing, especially if you stretch out the time involved from where her route ends to the actual graduation.
-As far as Hanako goes, I would argue she ends up better off in Lilly's route than her own, and near the end of Lilly's route (which happens before Tanabata) she gains the confidence to see more of the country. Given that LtF goes all the way to graduation, I can see her gaining some confidence by the end of the year, just not as quickly as she did with Hisao in her life.
-Lilly is an interesting one, because in her own route, she leaves fairly early in her bad end. However, she's in Shizune's route at a point long after she would have left, throwing a wrench in the timeline. I personally believe that Lilly would have fought much harder and stayed in Japan until graduation if Hisao was not involved in her and Hanako's life. Lilly feels that Hanako is in good hands in her own/Hanako's route, so she's more comfortable with doing so. If you've played Lilly's route then you have some idea what they're talking about with Akira, but Hisao doesn't know that and the girls have no real need to elaborate or explain to someone new to the situation. Hisao is eavesdropping.
Apologies if the following is a bit rambly as I write this out.
A few other things about the story – over the last few weeks, I've been going over every chapter and formatting them to be either a digital copy e-book, or actual books. I've looked at some one-off/small run publishers online, but LtF is so long at 300k+ words that it's impossible to fit into one single book, especially once you add pictures(the new backgrounds, all of the art I've commissioned or has been made for the route, or made myself with Koikatsu).
The entire story would have to be split into three separate volumes, with Act 1 and 2 together in the first book (labeled Prologue and Book 1 respectively). Act 3 would be the second book, with Act 4 being the third and final. The cost per volume comes out to about $20USD per book, so the total set with all the pictures included and in color would be just shy of $60.
I'll definitely be ordering a copy of this for myself – if anyone else is interested in such a thing, let me know and I'm sure we can figure something out.
Regardless, there were a lot of SPaG errors in the earlier chapters especially, and I ended up fixing a lot of things during that editing pass. I'll be replacing the chapters here and on fanfiction.net with the errors fixed, since so many people said they wanted to do a reread once it was completed.
It's been really strange to finish this project. I'm glad I got it done, but there's a part of me that feels really melancholy. There were a lot of complicated emotions the first few days, and then life took me for a ride again.
I got inspired after seeing Lindsay Sterling in concert, and I knew I wanted to write a story about a violinist before I wanted to write about Saki specifically. When I saw the April Fool's post, I knew instantly that I wanted to write about Saki and the struggles she would face as a musician because of her disability. I didn't want to keep her in the art club because I felt it would be too similar to Rin's route, and it would be a good chance to explore some more facets of Yamaku that don't get touched on in the main game. I ended up loving writing her as she developed through the course of the story, and I'm really proud of how she turned out.
I had never heard of Your Lie In April until I was years into writing this, and once I learned what the synopsis was, I steered clear of it. I didn't want that story influencing my own because I tend to write in the style of whatever I'm reading. I can look back and tell when I was reading GRRM(suck it, I got my novel done before you finished Winds of Winter), Michael Crichton, or Larry Niven, etc. Now that LtF is done, I look forward to enjoying it.
One of the things I'm most proud of though are people saying that they really liked my take on Hisao. I put a lot of myself into him. I had my diving injury twenty five years ago to the day that I'm posting this (October 3rd) and when the incident happened, well...I could have handled it much better than I did. I thought my faith and my friends/family would be all that I needed, so I turned down any type of therapy that wasn't physical. I was young and didn't realize how important it is to heal the mind along with the body, and it's one of those things that really, really fucked me up years later and even to this day. Writing Hisao has been incredibly cathartic because now that I'm older, I have more empathy and life experience to look back on that time in my life with serious introspection on the person I've ended up becoming the last eleven years. I have more lenses to see things through than I did back then, and they've been pretty eye opening. The game itself and writing this route has sort of served as a mental do-over for that period of my life.
My therapist actually ended up reading part of this story when I was trying to explain my thoughts on suicide and the right to die with dignity. Hi, V!
Learning To Fly ended up changing a lot from what I envisioned initially.
To begin with, each route has a second girl the first is friends with or paired up with. Misha/Shizune, Rin/Emi, and Lilly/Hanako. Regardless of who you get, the other girl is a major factor in that route because you need a few more people to bounce conversations and growth off of, rather than it being only Hisao and whatever girl he's pursuing. I wanted Saki to have a friend like this, and in 2013 when I started writing this, it was very popular to have Rika and Saki be a pair. Rika is a second year student and I didn't want to make things difficult on myself by adding that in as a complication. Thus, after seeing artwork from wheee, I decided to make Chisato and Noriko to fill the roles of Saki's existing friend group. Chisato is my favorite character to write for, hands down. I think it's because you can do a lot more with a supporting cast than you can do with the focus characters and let them develop in their own ways. I didn't anticipate the cast growing as large as it did. To my count, there are seventeen OC's in this fic (I'm including Maeda in this) and I hope I was able to juggle them all effectively.
I'm not quite sure when I decided the details on what happened with Kayoko. I don't have my old notes anymore (use Google Docs to write your stories, people!) but I wanted that to be the secret Saki was hiding that the April Fool's post mentioned. I vaguely remember that Noriko would be the one most affected by the truth of Kayoko's death and would transfer out of the school with no closure of the issue for Hisao and Saki. Ultimately, that happened with Maeda instead. It sucks, but once you graduate high school, you're not going to be maintaining 90% of the friendships you cultivated or even see those people again, and any attempt at reconciliation involving Maeda would have felt trite and forced.
Looking back, it was probably about halfway through Act 2 when I figured out where I wanted to go with it. There's a few Chekhov guns in those early chapters. I had initially planned for something bad to happen; Chisato would have either been unable to get to her pump, or she would get a bad batch of insulin. She was a Type 1 diabetic because I was dating a Type 1 diabetic at the time and I had to learn how to handle emergency situations with her that thankfully never came up. It felt too incidental so I scrapped the idea and instead focused on the Kayoko thread, while still giving Chisato an emotional gut punch.
I had to do a lot of research for this story. I got my hands on every medical document I could regarding ataxia, its treatment, and the therapies associated with it. Saki's depiction of it is mostly accurate, but there's some creative liberties thrown in. I believe I settled on SCA-6 because it attacks the extremities more slowly, but at the time of writing there were only a handful of identified cases and none of them were from Asiatic people. If I set in stone or revealed it for what it was, then suddenly I have to write about how Saki was the first Japanese person to have this disease, and it would just spiral into missing the forest for the trees. The same thing happens with Hisao in the original game – his arrhythmia is more of a plot point to progress the story and not much is gone into about his treatment.
It's accurate enough for a show like House or Greg's Anatomy.
The time skip between Acts 3 and 4 was so I could use the literary trick of Hisao and Saki's relationship developing offscreen, so to speak. It was easier to write them as a couple that had been together for a few months instead of everything that went into it, and it also was easier to show how Saki and Hisao's conditions would have progressed. To my knowledge, I don't think there's another fanfic or route besides Lilly's where Hisao ends up getting a pacemaker, but I could be wrong on that.
Finally, all of the character names were from the novel Battle Royale, one of my favorite books. I just switched the first and last names of some characters.
Again, I cannot thank all of you enough for all the support, critique, proofreading, and sharing of this story over the last eleven years. It's crazy to think that I started writing this at the tail end of my twenties and now I turn forty in less than two months. I found lifelong friends through this community, found love and lost it, and gained a confidence in my creative abilities I never thought I could have. I've had to move ten times in the past eleven years so it's been hard to feel like I'm putting down roots, but I can say I kept the desk I've been writing with. I bought a desk at a thrift store as one of my first purchases when I moved to my new city, and that desk has been with me every move. The first and last words of LtF were written on it, and I'm never going to give this thing up.
I do know for sure I'm not done writing by any means. Whether it's the epilogue, another fanfic, or something original, I don't know. But I do know that I can cross out “write a novel” off of the bucket list. I can also look back at the original opening post with the benefit of hindsight, something I am equally grateful for.
If my brain droppings have had an effect on you over the years, or inspired you to write your own, I'm truly happy to hear that.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart, to each and every one of you.
). I've basically lived the part of life that Hisao and Saki will get to spend together in the time this story was written, and am around the age where they'll have to go through with the inevitable end of their relationship. It really puts things into perspective.
) The fact that you've stuck with and finally crossed the finish line with LtF after everything is the ultimate proof. You're an absolute warrior, I hope you know that. IMO the best stories are ones where the author has left a piece of themself in it, and you've very clearly done so with this.
). 
