My Stepsister is My Ex-Girlfriend - Volume 11 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

Not to toot my own horn, but I’m not a big reader of mystery novels. At best, I might read one a year or something. If anything, I’m more into mystery games. That’s why whenever Yume mouths off a title of a mystery novel, I make sure I’ve already read it so I know it like the back of my hand.

My point is that even someone like me can write a mystery...or at least, that’s the kind of message I’ve wanted to try spreading recently. That aside, I think I should explain the reasoning behind why StepExes is a mystery novel this time around.

In the first place, I already had an idea to make StepExes into a mystery series before it was novelized. The reason I gave up on that had to do with me not having any confidence in pulling it off, and also because it’d feel like an unnecessary element to the story. That being said, now that we’ve passed the ten-volume mark, it’s starting to become time to think about how I’m gonna wrap up the series. I’ve honestly thought that it’s a little rough to keep going on as I’ve been doing.

To come clean, there have been two things that I’ve been worried about since volume 4. The first has to deal with me having absolutely no clue how to wrap up a long-running rom-com. The other has to do with Mizuto and Yume not having any screen time when I try to highlight other characters.

I haven’t really mentioned this too much, but presently, StepExes is the first straight-up rom-com that I’ve worked on. Everything else has included action or mystery solving, so I’m completely lacking in experience in the ending-a-rom-com department.

I thought that I could try out a lot of different things as I worked on it, but after writing the tenth volume, lo and behold, I still don’t have a clue what to do. I’ve just been writing my way down this foggy path, finding it difficult to slap together an entire volume. You might think writing a mystery is hard, but honestly, writing StepExes is a million times harder.

There’s a belief out there that when a writer’s agonizing over their work, it’s because they have a lot of ideas floating around, but even if something good can come out of that, there’s no point unless they can actually put it into words. That was a painful lesson I learned while helping with the anime.

So, the theme I’m pursuing now is “reproducibility” and whether or not I can continuously create the same interesting thing. If not, even if you’re able to slap something together, there’s no future for it. If there’s no future, there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, boredom ensues, and in my opinion, boredom is the killer of creative types. As such, I’ve determined that I do not have the ability of reproducibility to prolong a rom-com, and have adopted a different approach.

And that’s where the idea for writing a mystery came from. So, why did I choose a mystery? Well, to explain that, I have to talk about the other thing I’ve been worried about. In order to have a mystery be the basis for the story, the other characters have to be the focal point of the drama. It’s just like in Sherlock Holmes stories, in which you need a Sherlock and you need a Watson. These two roles were filled by Mizuto and Yume respectively.

In reality, the main focus of this volume was Asuhain-san, but there’s only one scene focused on her. The mystery genre is one in which this kind of construction makes it easier to write.

In volume 10, I took Yume and Mizuto’s relationship as far as I could, and I started thinking that Mizuto had the aptitude to be a detective. A lot of requirements were met, so I decided to give it a shot.

It took about a month to come up with the overall plot, but thanks to that, I had a pretty easy time working on everything. This time around, I switched to speech-to-text instead of typing everything out...even if that resulted in a lot of incorrect inputs, especially with the name “Asuhain.”

But anyway, that’s how the mystery came together. I think it’s a pretty respectable mystery, and I hope everyone who, as a result, got a little more interested in the genre can read something (my own personal advertisement) steeped even deeper in the genre like Sherlock + Academy (MF Bunko J) or Boku ga Kotaeru Kimi no Nazotoki (SEIKAISHA e-FICTIONS).

I plan for the next volume to focus on Kawanami and Akatsuki. One morning, the two of them wake up to find themselves in the same bed?! I haven’t thought any further than that... The story’s planned, but uncertain.

Anyway, this has been Kyosuke Kamishiro’s My Stepmom’s Daughter Is My Ex Volume 11: You Wouldn’t Get It. You might have guessed, but I really like writing girls chatting with each other.