Editing Tsurugi no Joou to Rakuin no Ko:Volume 1 Afterword

==Afterword==

As this is my first job in MF Bunko, I’ll have to say to the readers, hello, nice to meet you!

When I first received a request from MF Bunko for me to write a book, I already had two stories at hand. One of them I already had the story in mind, while I only had a few ideas and characters thought out for the other. I emailed both of my proposals to my editor. Basically, if the former went through, I could start writing any day, but if he liked the latter, I actually thought at the time that it would be rather troublesome. After all, that email contained only a document that contained ideas that just surfaced in my mind.

When I think about it, that idea was actually born from a desire to write a Western fantasy, and I wanted to see a girl dressed like a girl, running on the battlefield with a large sword. But the problem was, putting the girl on a battlefield wasn’t really hard, but rather making her go on a battlefield without armor. That required a convincing reason. Regarding that part, I thought of many different possibilities, for instance she could predict her enemies’ attacks. If so, not wearing armor would be to her advantage. Apart from that, most deaths on the battlefield in the olden days were due to arrow injuries, so she could just sweep the whole rain of arrows away with a swing of her large sword……

At this point, I believe that you already know which proposal the editorial team chose— the proposal with only ideas and characters.

Anyway, everything had to be written from scratch. Hence, I had to start discussing for ideas with my editor…… We started over after the end of the meeting about the first draft. After I started writing, we started over yet again. In the end, the direction of the story was completely different from the first draft. I apologize for the trouble that I gave to my editors in this aspect……

But speaking of which, during the process of continually starting over from scratch, there are two parts that did not change— the title of the story and the female lead’s name.

Everyone knows that playing cards contain K, Q and J, and these cards have different suits. It is said that each card was actually modeled on a person in a real legend. The ‘Sword Queen’ of spades was modeled Pallas Athena from Greek mythology, and she was known as Minerva in Roman mythology. If any of you have playing cards at hand, you can take a look at how the Queen of spades looks like. That would be Minerva.

Actually, when I wrote until here, I took out my playing cards to have a look as well, but since that set was a special gift from B’z’s CD, the picture on Q was of course one of Matsumoto and Koushi, so it was really quite meaningless in various aspects……

Finally, when I received the illustrations of the book from the illustrator, Yuu Hitoshi-sensei, I could even an illusion of “Yuu Hitoshi-sensei drew the illustrations first, then I’m taking a look at it to get ideas from it”……. No, it wasn’t an illusion, I did indeed receive the drafts of the characters when I was writing. So sorry for handing in my draft so late, and thank you for drawing such beautiful illustrations for this work. Please allow me to thank you here!

Sugii Hikaru



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