Ascendance of a Bookworm (LN) - Volume 1.1 - Chapter Aft

Afterword 

Hi, I’m Miya Kazuki. Thank you very much for reading Ascendance of a Bookworm Part 1: Volume 1. 

In this volume, Urano’s life of being surrounded by and reading books was turned completely upside down. This is the story of Myne, a soldier’s daughter, striving to survive in a world without accessible books while inflicted with a disease that could reasonably end her life at any moment. 

If you can’t buy books, make books. But she doesn’t even have the paper necessary to make books. If you don’t have paper, make paper. But she doesn’t have the stamina, strength, height, age, or money to make paper. In the midst of lacking almost everything imaginable, she wields her knowledge to gain allies in her struggle. All to grant her dream of living a life surrounded by books once again and to make up for having died right before starting her dream librarian job. If you enjoyed watching Myne go wild in her reckless quest for books, well, consider me happy. 

Now then, it’s been one year and four months since I started writing this story on Shousetsuka ni Narou* and I can say I never even dreamed that it would actually get published like this. Especially because, to be frank, this is a very long story. It’s a web novel, so I’ve been casually packing it full of all the things I love and want to write about without a care in the world for how long it ends up. I’ve been writing for over a year and it’s still not done. 

But despite that, I was very pushy when it came to this published version. I wouldn’t let them abridge “Part 1: A Soldier’s Daughter” into a single volume, for instance, and I requested that not only the cute girls of the series but the older guys that are slowly introduced over the course of the story get cool drawings as well. I asked for a map of the city and an illustration of her apartment... I asked for everything I could think of, expecting my requests to be denied, but they kept granting them one by one. Isn’t that amazing? Everyone at TO Books accepted my selfishness and made this wonderful book. For that I cannot thank them enough. 

I would also like to thank You Shiina for drawing these cute and pretty illustrations despite being so busy. Thanks to these illustrations, it’s much easier to imagine the characters moving around in my head. Thank you. 

And finally, I express my greatest gratitude to those of you who are reading this book now. I hope that we can meet again in volume two. 

December 2014, Miya Kazuki. 

*Shousetsuka ni Narou is a Japanese website where web novels can be read and posted for free.