Afterword

Hello for the first time, or good evening, or it’s been a while.
I’m the author, Shikimoto Hono.

Thank you so much for reading A Yuri About Being Asked “Hey, Aren’t You Gonna Do Anything?” by an Older Colleague.
(It’s a mouthful, so I’ve been calling it Older Colleague Yuri to myself.)

…I mean, this afterword is going up the day after the novel finished, so there’s that.
I wasn’t even sure I needed one — but I received such an incredible amount of warmth from readers over this past week, and I’m still riding the wave of it, so I wanted to leave something here.

…The timing’s a little late, isn’t it?
I know. I know. I should have written it yesterday.

Anyway — read on if you’d like.

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I started writing this one right after finishing and scheduling my first work (Childhood Friends Yuri), so it took me about two weeks to write, and just over a week to finish posting. A short piece, in the end.

Running daily updates from my first Kakuyomu post through to this one, I’ve kept it up for about two months total.
Exhausted… Even though I had nine episodes written in advance, I finished the epilogue on the train to work the morning it was due to go up. That was cutting it extremely close.

The reason I wrote this one was that when I finished my first work, I felt like it wasn’t good enough yet.
I wanted to write something short to build up my craft — and this, Older Colleague Yuri, was the first attempt at that.

My goals for this one were:

• Get daily readership (my first work spent a long stretch hovering around zero to one views per day — though I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who did read it)\
• Aim for the top 100 in the weekly romance rankings (my first work just barely grazed the 200s)

As it turned out, I did get daily readers — and this morning (the day of this afterword), I got a notification that Older Colleague Yuri had hit 99th place in the weekly romance category.
Honestly, for a complete beginner throwing scraps into the wind, that’s more than I could have asked for. It’s entirely down to your support. Thank you, truly.

Oh — I had one more goal I forgot to mention.

• Actually put mildly explicit content into my own work and send it out into the world!!

I’d never done that before in my own writing, so this was partly an exercise in breaking through that particular wall. I also genuinely wasn’t sure how far Kakuyomu’s guidelines would allow — and since nothing happened, I now know the answer is: further than I thought! A useful discovery.

Because I teased things in the prologue, Episode 1 apparently left some readers going “wait, where did the prologue go? Why are we at work??” and views dropped off at Episode 2. Ha. It’s fine — it was exactly what I wanted to do, so I have no regrets.

That said, the readers who made it through Episodes 1, 2, and 3 stuck with the story all the way to the end in pretty solid numbers — which means everything to me.

(Also: apparently anyone can see per-episode view counts on Kakuyomu? I just found that out. Mildly alarming.)

Thank you for trusting me and coming along. Having people trust something I made and follow it through to the end is an experience I’ve barely had in my life, and it gave me a genuine thrill.

There were moments late at night where I’d be watching my phone and a heart would come in on the prologue — and then a few minutes later, another heart, and another, as that reader worked through every posted episode in real time.

The warmth of that hit me somewhere deep after a rough commute home.

To everyone who did that: BIG LOVE.

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As for Mio and Riwa-san’s story — I’ve written their beginning here in one rush, but everything that comes to mind for a continuation is just… quietly peaceful domestic stuff. Nothing with any particular drama.

And a novel needs something to happen, right? Probably.

But all I can picture is the two of them drifting along in a nice comfortable nothing… ha.

So for now, these two are on hold until something comes to me. If it were a manga I could draw plotless slice-of-life all day, but my skills aren’t there yet. I want to — I just can’t.

Coming up next: I’ve finally had a breather for the first time in two months, so I’m planning to read other people’s works for a while, get back to drawing, work on the next short story I have half-plotted, and maybe think about something longer.

Writing fiction started as a way to expand my creative range overall — I figured developing stories would give my illustrations and other work more grounding and depth — and it’s become something I genuinely enjoy. I’ll probably wander off to draw sometimes too, so please be patient with me.

Oh — my first work, Childhood Friends Yuri, still gets occasional visitors, but I can see in the numbers that they tend to leave quickly, probably going “where’s the yuri the tags promised?” I do want to revisit that one at some point. I’m not changing the core of it, but there’s a “sorry you had to see this” quality to the early chapters — too many male characters up front, not enough yuri soon enough. I’d probably handle it as a separate rewrite rather than replacing the original. That’s fine on Kakuyomu, right?

It’s very much a passion project — those two characters were born during a game project I worked on a few years back (that I never finished, naturally), so they carry a certain sentimental weight for me.

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If you have any thoughts, feedback, or corrections — even typos or phrasing — I’d love to hear them in the comments. All of it helps me with future work. Reader comments are basically my primary food source.

And if you’d like to follow the author, I’d be very grateful — more is on the way.
I’ll celebrate with full enthusiasm for every bit of support.

Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end of this rambling mess.
I hope to see you again with another story.
Until next time!