I need to come clean, it was kinda hard to write this afterword. I don’t know, maybe it's because this signals the actual end of the first book. Which, in turn, directly relates to why it took me so long to write the last chapter and, on a smaller scale, the one before it.

And I still can’t quite understand why that is the case. Everything that happened in the last chapter had already been planned. In theory, this should have been the easiest of all chapters to write, a conclusion to what had been building up for a long time. 

To give you an idea, I had already planned since the start of last year, long before Dene's death and back when Hagen and Athalia had only appeared once during the flashback. That's why I thought this chapter would be the easiest to write up until now; everything was already set, all I needed was to put it in words.

Well, this turned out to be the problem. For whatever reason, I kept doubting everything that I wrote, constantly typing something just to find it wrong, delete it, muse over it for 10 minutes, and then write it again, exactly as before. No matter what I tried, it felt like I couldn't convey the emotions that I had in mind. It came to the point where I was getting tired even thinking about sitting down to write.

Hopefully, this will become less of a problem as I learn and gain more experience. It would suck to have this happening every time I’m about to finish a book because, honestly, I do hope to make a career out of this one day. 

But enough talking about the past. Now to talk about the future, and for that, we first need to go even further into the past :D

Back when I first started writing the story, it was for a Qidian/Webnovel contest, and it was supposed to be a short story about the events that led to the transmigration rather than what happened after. In other words, it was supposed to end at the prologue.

And you guys think that the flashback ran for too long; the whole story has gone way past the original plan. Seriously though, despite s̶o̶m̶e̶ various hardships along the way, I can look back and say that I've really enjoyed writing this book.

For my plans going forward, I first want to go back through the story and make some changes\improvements that have been on my mind for a while now. For what I plan to do, I have separated the story into three parts. Part 1 is the first 16 chapters, part 2 is the flashback, and part 3 is everything after it.

I plan to rewrite part 1 entirely while making very few changes to the story. Save for one, whatever changes I make will be very minor and I'll get in more detail about it later. Back to part 1, if you have already read it then you won’t need to read it again to understand the rest of the story though, hopefully, there'll be a noticeable improvement in the writing quality.

Part 2 will get the axe, pure and simple. I wrote it because I wanted to make it easier to understand Dene’s story, and having her make a summary of it to fit in a single chapter seemed awkward at the time. What I failed to realize was how big the flashback would get, to the point where the few things of importance were buried amid a pile of chapters of very little consequence to the rest of the story. While having a summary still sounds a bit awkward, it's a much more preferable solution.

As for part 3, it’ll remain the same save for a few grammar checks.

Now, here are the changes that I mentioned about part 1. The main change isn’t really impactful to the story, but it’ll be quite noticeable for the reader. That’ll be changing the MC’s name after reincarnating from John to Jon. The main reason for it is because his name was supposed to be just Jonathan shortened and, back when I began writing, I thought John was the shortened version. 

Turns out I was wrong because of etymology and stuff.

Other than that, the name Jon also has the added benefit of sounding more fantasy-like.

As for other changes, they aren’t really important in the sense that they will change the story. Rather these will be solely to make the world a bit more immersive. Exciting things such as giving names to the coins.

Up until now, for example, I’ve just been calling them platinum coins, gold coins, etc. Now we will have platinum Crowns in honor of the royal family. Golden Centarii, a “legacy” of the time when the Northern Kingdoms were under Solisian occupation. And then we have silver Shillings and copper Pence… I’m lazy, sue me.

This is just for Gwynland, the kingdom where the story takes place. Other Kingdoms have their own, different currencies.

I’m also trying to come up with a word for the carriages carried by the gale eagles. At first, I called them litters during the flashback because that was the closest I could find to what I had in mind. Later I experimented with wheelless carriages or simply carriages, but it still sounded a bit off. If I can’t come up with a word, then I’ll just keep using the same as before. As I said, these aren’t all that important.

Finally, I plan to finish this all by the end of February, meaning that the second book will start in March. I’ll try to post the rewritten prologue in advance at the discord, same for the second book chapters when the time comes. The reason for that is twofold.

First, to give a purpose to the discord. I originally created it as a single way to interact with you guys given that I post this story on more than one site. Turns out that I am as bad at interacting through the internet as I am in real life, though, so that failed. So now, at least, you’ll be able to read the chapters a bit early.

As for the second reason, I often leave simple grammar mistakes in my chapters. I use Grammarly and also read through the chapters as I finish them but, even so, some errors manage to slip through, only being discovered later by you guys. By then, the chapters are already posted so I have to correct the error in every other site, which is a bit tiresome. By posting the chapters early at the discord, I hope that you guys can point me to these errors beforehand.

And I guess that’s it for the afterword. See you guys next week as I start to rewrite the prologue.