Afterword

Hello for the first time, or good evening, or it’s been a while.

I’m Shikimoto Hono.

There’s a self-indulgent rambling section this time too, so first — my thanks.

Thank you so much for sticking with The Yuri Where the Discipline Committee Chair Gets Blackmailed by a White-Haired Gyaru and Wrecked Playing “Yuri Friends” (I’ve been calling it Yuri-Tomo Yuri because the full title is so long) all the way to the end!

The title was just a placeholder I put down because I couldn’t think of anything — and then I ended up finishing the whole work with it still in place…

Also, one apology. I’ve never actually encountered a discipline committee in my own life, so I made the whole thing up as I went! Sorry!!!

Ahem.

So, this ended up quite a bit longer than I’d planned, but to everyone who made it all the way here, and to everyone who read even just a little — I’m filled with nothing but heartfelt gratitude!!

When my second work [the older-colleague yuri] finished, I thought “ahh, I really should have written an afterword!!” — I had that regret the very next day after posting the final episode, and made a weird emergency update at the time. Learning from that lesson, I flung this afterword into the scheduled posting queue at the absolute last possible second. As I write this it’s the 14th of May. Genuinely cutting it close. I wanted to have it done singing to myself ages ago.

Anyway, setting that aside.

If you felt even a little “I liked this,” I’d be absolutely overjoyed if you left bookmarks or star reviews — I’ll leap for joy! Stars can be left in the review section at the bottom of the page (after the short stories etc. that follow), or from this URL:

(The URL to the original story is on the front page)

…Hm? You saw the same thing on the final episode page? Listen, anyone who reads this far has to have a generous soul, so I’m making my shameless pitch again!! Please, please!! I’m begging you!!
(To everyone who has already sent reviews — I am genuinely, deeply grateful!!!!!)

If you’d like, please follow the author too!

Your support is what keeps Shikimoto Hono going!

I’m already working on the concept for my next work! If you’re interested, please follow and wait patiently!

Thank you so, so much!

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Below: a self-indulgent rambling section written down for my own future reference. For anyone with nothing but time on their hands. …Just write it in a diary? Yeah, fair.

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My second work finished at the end of July… so I started working on this one then… wait, has it been nearly ten months?!

Summer’s over, autumn’s over, winter’s over, spring’s nearly over and summer’s coming back around??

Already????????

No, it’s too long!! I thought I’d be done faster than this!!

There are two reasons it got this long.

One: the concept kept flipping and reversing, and I dismantled it so many times it bore no resemblance to the original.

Unforgettably, last summer I was lying in an orthopaedic waiting room with a bad back when a particular phrase came to me. I was building from that phrase as my foundation, but somehow it kept pulling the story into dark, heavy directions, and it was genuinely hard going — how to connect things, how to move the plot forward.

I kept a weekly progress log back then, and looking back at it now, all it says is it won’t end, it won’t end…

I tried putting in the choking thing and other such proclivities, but they just wouldn’t come together somehow. I’d like to try that again someday. In the end I couldn’t make it work on my own and had to let it go, I think right before winter.

From there I tried making one of them a gyaru (I’m not sure that’s quite the right word, but), tore apart and rebuilt the premise over and over, tried one thing and then another, stared down Nola for ages… and settled on the current direction around the end of last year.

Maya and Hiyori’s names were carried over from the start without changing (almost), but everything else — the relationship, the characters, everything — was reset wholesale. It wasn’t until I landed on the gyaru-and-discipline-committee-member premise — obvious as it is — that I could finally see the work through to completion.

Honestly, with no end in sight it felt like an endless hell and I thought my sanity was going to give out!! Creativity is this painful!!!!!

So the content ended up completely different from what I’d originally had in mind, but in my own head I thought of it all as one continuous work.

Maya the discipline committee chair and Hiyori the white-haired gyaru are my personal goddesses. They rescued me from that endless unfinishable hell!

Both of them ended up drifting quite a bit from my original character concepts, I think.

Maya — I wanted her to be even more fixated on her grades and position than she ended up being. I wanted her to have that I’ll hold out to the last spirit. But she just keeps falling immediately and ends up doing the blackmailing herself, what’s going on??

Hiyori — she was going to be a cool, bewitching type going far beyond small devil energy, and in the early parts especially she really was pretty awful… I mean, secretly filming someone and blackmailing them is a crime, right?? Genuinely unhinged!! If it had been anyone other than Maya, wouldn’t she be expelled on the spot??

Well, but then Maya starting up in the classroom is also pretty unhinged… so let’s call it even!!

Anyway, I was going to bring out even more of that dark, wickedly seductive side of her, but somehow by the end… isn’t it you who ended up wrecked? Why?? She was supposed to be a more bewitching girl, in the end she didn’t quite get there, lol.

Well — people are alive, so! (?)

Sasaki-chan — I remembered her partway through and dragged her back in, but I really put her through it… haha.

Airi, Yuina, Meiko — I named them wanting the middle character of each name to be i (愛莉, 唯菜, 明衣子). I could have given them a bit more page time though. Three characters is genuinely hard.

…Anyway, the other reason it got so long was simply: the episode count ballooned.

I was going to wrap it up as a quick short story again this time, but why did that not happen??

If anyone read my progress notes they might have seen this too, but — I kept thinking about whether these two could move forward without anything in between, and whether I needed to properly build up their relationship, and worrying about consistency like that made me add more slice-of-life episodes, which made the whole thing stretch out oddly long.

If anyone felt that certain parts dragged — that’s my own limitations as a writer, and I apologise. I need to think about how to handle those sections better next time.

So those two main factors are why it took as long as it did. Even so, why this much… honestly.

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This work had a few goals.

First: to try for the kind of quick scene-cutting, snappy-paced energy you get in well-paced manga on social media. Did I pull it off? Sort of? Not really?

Second: to make the prose style a little more pop than my last work, lighter and less emotionally heavy. Whether that worked — also unclear!

Third: to thread in that kind of content thinly from the start, and then ramp it up heavily from the middle onward! This is actually the main one! Yes!

I was idly scrolling X one day and a mysterious phrase, “Polynesian sex,” happened to float past. I looked it up with a blank expression, and tried to be a little conscious of it this time around.

Start slow with hugs and kisses, build step by step, and then — impact at the end! Did it not work out? I’m sorry!!!!!

Written out like this it just sounds like… a completely normal thing? Escalating toward a climax is just standard storytelling, isn’t it? Lol.

The big final impact section — I’d originally had them, you know, fully coming together in a much more explicit way right through to the end, but I ended up toning it down in the revision stage. It felt like that last step might have been… overdoing it, a little. (The prose may have been pretty rough too and that’s a secret between us!!)

And yes — that revision thing! Also a problem! By revision, I mean: the pathetic, desperate habit of getting everything finished and queued up in scheduled posting, and then as each episode goes live and I look at it again, thinking hmm, something’s off, and starting to quietly fix the not-yet-posted ones. One by one.

I queued the whole thing at the end of March when I started posting, telling myself I wouldn’t touch it again, right?? And then I start revising anyway so it was never actually easy right up to the end!! Stop doing it in the final week!!!

So next time I want to queue it in a genuinely finished state…

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Honestly, I had planned to stop posting to Kakuyomu after this work.

Because it makes no sense! It’s just a hobby and yet I’ve been losing sleep every day, groaning about how it won’t end, my mental health taking a battering — why am I going through this for fun… I want to escape… I don’t want to feel like this… it’s too absurd, doing this to yourself!!

That’s what I thought.

A real-life friend who’s known this account since the first work even said to me: “I thought you’d stopped, I hadn’t seen any updates.”

I know right!! Same!!

I mean, I could have just stopped and done something else, but it seems my personality is such that once I start something, until I finish it there’s this… fish bone stuck in my throat feeling, I just can’t settle…

Even though the characters changed a lot, the only thing keeping me going was the sense of responsibility — I had to see Maya and Hiyori through to their ending, no matter what.

Well, I have abandoned things before in my life? Game development for instance?!?

But somehow I gritted my teeth and finished it and posted it and thought, okay that’s done now —

And then, while even my previous work had gotten more attention than I could believe (by my own standards), this time even more so, in ways I couldn’t have imagined a year ago…

It got to 5th on the romance weekly rankings for a moment, lots of people reading it, lots of star reviews…

And you know what, it really proved to me what a simple creature I am at heart — motivation, the need for validation, all of it came shambling back out without a shred of shame… hehe… sorry…

So: I’m taking back the quitting!

But I’m going to try to approach it more casually!

Next up, I have a short, lighter story that came to me just recently, so I’m going to try to get that into shape first. Whether I can manage it…

And after that, I want to finally get the idea I’ve had in my head since August last year into form — the one that isn’t the one I gave up on. Why am I not doing that one first?? Even I don’t know.

And originally I started writing prose as practice for plotting stories to eventually turn into manga, but I’ve been letting the art practice slide while the months pile up!! Am I finally going to do something about that?!

But before any of that — maybe I’ll slowly work through the tower of unread yuri manga and novels I’ve been buying on Kindle every time there’s a sale on X since last summer…

I mean, I was putting basically all my non-work, non-sleep hours into this, so I haven’t been able to get in the mood to read, I kept telling myself I’d read once this was done, and then it got out of hand…

Ahh, but I also want to go and read works by people I follow on X, and popular works too…

There aren’t enough hours!! I want to quit my job!! I can’t though!!!!

The weekly progress notes will go back to irregular for now, but I’m still around on X, so please drop by if you like! I’ll probably mostly just be there tired from work and muttering to myself… but I’m actually fairly fond of the free-form progress notes format too. It’s nice to just let text pour out. Does anyone think pointless progress notes are a bad thing?? X doesn’t lend itself to rambling like this. If anyone has thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

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For real, finally.

Anyone who read this far into this very unhinged self-indulgent ramble — are you there? Are you out there?

If you are, reply to me. Let’s be pen pals.

Truly, trul-y — thank you so much.

If you feel like it, comments are also very welcome.

Comments and hearts were such a motivation boost!! Every heart of encouragement I got on each episode, it genuinely made me happy every single time!!

I’ll probably put out another work — definitely, well, probably, well, maybe… at some point — so I hope we’ll meet again there!!

Until then!!!!!