Sugar Apple Fairytale - Volume 1 - Chapter Aft

AFTERWORD

Nice to meet you, everyone. My name is Miri Mikawa.

This book is a revised edition of the work that received the Special Jury Award in the Seventh Beans Novel Contest.

When I sent in my entry, the thing I was most worried about was that I might have mistakenly violated the rules of the competition. I realize that’s not what I should have been concerned about, but at that time, I was afraid the judges would toss my manuscript out without even reading it because of a transgression.

I read the application rules carefully, and the one that gave me the most trouble was the stipulation that the books had to be “between one hundred fifty and three hundred pages when converted to a four-hundred-character manuscript paper.” I wondered whether the white spaces counted as characters for the conversion.

I wanted to ask someone, but I didn’t know anyone who might have had the answer. Besides, even if I had known someone, I was sure it was a stupid question… A bit like asking, Teacher, do bananas count as a snack?

So I decided that, regardless of whether the line breaks and blank spaces were included in the character count or not, I would make sure that my page count wouldn’t fall outside the range stated in the rules. That way, I would be safe.

I trimmed down the dialogue and further refined the story.

I ended up with a manuscript that met the page count.

Then when the manuscript was being turned into a book, it wound up several dozen pages too short, and I found out I needed to revise it.

I had been overly worried about the rules of the contest and had cut my work to satisfy the conditions, but it turned out to be shorter than a typical book.

But thanks to being allowed to make revisions, I had a little more leeway to expand my tightly-packed story.

I hope it’s at least a little better now than what I originally submitted.

I have nothing but gratitude for the esteemed judges who carefully read through the manuscript that I so nervously submitted and selected it as a winner. I’d also like to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone in the editorial department who kindly read it after it was chosen and to everyone who was part of the selection process.

In addition, I need to thank the managers who were very friendly and considerate to someone like me, who is still so useless. I say a little prayer whenever I’m treated so nicely. Thank you so much. I look forward to working with you in the future.

And—and I have to mention Aki, who drew the illustrations. I can’t tell you how happy I was when I learned that you would be drawing for me. The pictures of Anne and Challe that you illustrated are just wonderful. They’re such lucky characters!

I’m getting to the end here, but now I need to say something to all the people who picked up a copy of this book.

If it wasn’t to your liking, I am truly sorry. My apologies. Please have a laugh and forget all about it.

If it was to your liking, hooray! Thank you, I love you!

To each and every one of you, once again, thank you very much.

Miri Mikawa