The original update plan was to post Chapter 45 three days ago, but then I made a last minute decision to redo the sequence of a couple of events. Instead of uploading Chapter 46: ?????, I opted to upload chapter 45 first. This was to balance out the events. We had an action-overload for the past few chapters. There's a comedy part (courtesy of Suzuki Akio parts) and some significant side stories like Shizuki-Yuken scenes. Putting 'Cross' as chapter 45 was a wise decision, in my opinion. This is the best time to insert in the drama part. Otherwise, it would drag if I placed it in the latter parts.
Writing Chapter 45 was harder than I expected it to be. I think I revised it more than ten times. I deleted two full pages of unecessary reminiscences and left out only the significant ones. I was struggling to control the length of the chapter because as much as possible, I wanted to keep my chapters as concise as it could be but packed with scenes and fast transitions. I wanted to keep the conversations as brief as they could be, but overflowing with substance, meaning, and emotions. Writing drama was a challenge, because I need to carefully pick out the words I had to use to bring out the exact kind of emotion I wanted to impart to the reader. The goal was not to make the reader cry, but to make the reader symphatize with the characters or even bring themselves to imagine that they were in Ayane/Crosse's shoes. Meia did both though... (cried and symphatized).
I wanted the Ayane-Crosse scene to be cliche but powerful. The original plan was to make them walk/tour around the beach house. It was the cliche I was looking for, but then, if I were to locate their conversation in a beach, it would not be as significant. I wanted a location that would remind them of their past (and back in the United States, Ayane and Crosse did not have a memorable past located in a beach). Upon brainstorming, I ended up with things like rain, park, night, flickering lamp, and telephone booth. A phone booth sounded like a good option. It had a small space inside - very good place for cuddling? Hehe. So yeah, phone booth that is...
So how was Chapter 45? Hope that the drama didn't make you too depressed. Don't worry, the next chapters wouldn't be depressing ones.
Have your "shock absorbers" ready though, hehe.
I came to drop by our thread in Soompi Forums a while ago and I'm quite amazed of the thoughts and comments of the readers there, especially regarding Chapter 44. The long in-depth analysis got me going 'whoah!' (and yeah, followed by a hyena grin of course, hehe). Many great guesses! Miss syndryx was even able to guess about my big bomb regarding Yuken's real profession. Miss esther_hia was able to decipher the secret behind the Christmas tea. Miss pinkslippers was able to give a very good analysis regarding the difference between Crosse and Kosuke that made Ayane choose Kosuke in the end. There were many more brilliant replies (from Miss dreamagain, kc_chua, Silent Serenity, Twixxie, Rin Li, Stephanie, Jasmine, aRia, loveme100x, and many others). It makes me happy that people actually take the time to see between the words along the story for clues then pull the fragments together and see if they make any sense. After all, that's the purpose of a mystery fic. I'm relieved that at least, we're going to the right direction, hehe.
Again, regarding the Soompi FOTY, thank you very much again for the congratulation messages. I really do appreciate them. As I have expressed before, F&L wouldn't be participating in the FOTY this year. We are grateful for the support we've been receiving and that alone is priceless.
And regarding the plagiarism issue in India-Forum... errr... I contacted the forum moderator but so far I haven't gotten any feedback yet. The thread has been shut down long ago, so maybe it is as good as resolved I guess. I hope it doesn't happen again. Please, don't plagiarize F&L.
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