Foreword:

Almost 18 months have passed since I started conceptualizing and writing an outline for what has become quite an epic tale. If you asked me back then whether I thought I'd end up writing a high school romance story that went on for nearly the length of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, I would probably have laughed, hard, called you silly names, and probably left the room with a few mocking comments before slamming the door, setting fire to the building and... maybe that's going too far? Anyway, sitting her now in the beaten-up office chair I've had for two years – I'm not kind to my furniture – looking into a brand new 24" television that replaced my old monitor, I like to think I've been humbled by this experience.

When I first read the source material – Katawa Shoujo – it started as a lark. It wasn't until about half way through the first route that I figured out I wasn't just reading meaningless fluff. The characters created for the story, flawed as they are – and not just physically – quickly captivated some dark corner of my mind, and I couldn't stop reading. After finishing the first route – which was Rin's, incidentally – I already felt inspired. Still, I stayed the course and read through all the other routes – including all their endings, good and bad – before finally sitting back and thinking about what I'd just spent three days reading.

The stories were filled with hope and loss, trial and failure, love and uncertainty; all the things you want to see in a good book, split into five seemingly inconsequential tales of young love, stupidity, and angst – it was glorious. The only problem with what I'd just read was that it had ended, and there wouldn't be any more stories from the Yamaku universe according to its creators. After three days of reading and another day spent contemplating, I decided to seek out additional sources, and found my way to the fan art and fan fiction sections of the associated forums. Initially, because I'd been more of an art hobbyist for the previous ten years or so, I mostly perused the art section, though the majority of submissions were... less than appealing in an intellectual sense.

Then I moved on to the fan fiction section, which I knew would likely be a wasteland of terrible writing and equally awful grammar, but I managed to find a few gems. The expanded universe developed by some of the authors was inspiring, especially the particularly unusual entries that delved into the peripheral characters, alternate worlds, and extreme story-lines. In the end, I'm not sure how many stories I read from the forum, but I spent a week of free time plucking through the threads. When that was over, I started to realize I wanted to contribute somehow, and although I had initially thought to do so graphically, I ended up opening a new thread and started writing a tale involving a class reunion some five years later.

Thus the first chapter of Five Year Illumination (FYI) was written directly into the forums – no editing, no spelling check, just posted the manly way. It received mostly positive reviews, and the original version has been lost to later iterations, but I decided to continue the story based on positive feedback. Over the next week, I poured all my energy into expanding that story, and trying to extrapolate how the characters would have changed over the five years since graduation. Their lives continued to intersect, of course, and they all still suffered from their various disabilities, but their basic personalities and motivations hadn't changed. Unfortunately, it turns out that was a problem for me.

The thing about writing FYI was that I knew exactly how it would end. It might sound weird that the author knowing how the story would end is a bad thing, but it really made writing every word feel pointless – it's like reading the last page of a mystery novel, and then feeling bored half way through. The updates continued receiving critical acclaim, but I was quickly losing interest because it all felt too predictable. After focusing on that story for a week – which isn't a long time comparatively – I started thinking about how I could change things up, and that's when I recalled a somewhat obscure detail about Yamaku: Class 3-1 had largely been ignored.

Apart from a developer having mentioned that 3-1 contained mostly hearing-impaired students, the population therein was a complete mystery. It might sound strange, but the complete absence of characters in that room just sounded like an opportunity to me; none of its students appeared in the canonical story, so I could invent any people I wanted to populate its desks. So, as I was still writing chapters of FYI – which would soon find itself on the back burner – I started writing dramatis personae for an entire classroom full of students, and began searching online for cultural reference material to start my own OC pseudo-route.

In a few days time I had constructed character profiles for Aiko, Amaya, Tadao and Naoko, and named several other characters in the room including Ito, Yoko, Kenta, Jin and Toru. With just those profiles at hand, and a basic paragraph-long outline describing the events of the first act up through the festival, I started writing. It only took me one day to write the first chapter – Curiosity – in its original iteration. It has since been edited more heavily on the forum to remove some unnecessary honorifics, and switch the references to Tadao back to his first name, among other things, but that version is almost unchanged from the original.

You could say I was being a bit naïve to leap into such a big story after barely having written anything for ten years, and you'd be right; I didn't have a clue what I was getting myself into. That made it all the more exciting and challenging, though, and I can probably credit my lack of knowledge with how quickly I started pushing out content. In my ignorance, I had written the first chapter before establishing an outline beyond the festival, and I was still creating characters and making adjustments to the ever-expanding outline well past the first five chapters, but I've done that throughout – it's almost my signature.

Even in recent chapters, I've tossed in new characters almost on a whim, simply because they need to exist. Most of those are inconsequential characters like security guards and waitresses, or cameos from the original cast, but sometimes new characters just crop up in the narrative almost without a single notation beyond a mental one – Joyce and Satoru were invented in this manner. Granted, my main cast, including the association with the Student Council, was locked before I finished chapter 3, but some of the characters only had a name until they popped up in the narrative, at which point I would just experiment with their depiction and add the details to their profile afterward – it's probably a backwards way to write a story of this scale, but it works for me.

In any case, as much as FYI was an experiment, so is Tomorrow's Doom. In all honesty, I still make huge mistakes trying to get Aiko to sound right – I am not, nor have I ever been a teenage girl – and I constantly have to reference my notes, other sources, or simply ask other fans, family, or random strangers for guidance. The first twenty chapters really bother me in that they never even passed under the view of an editor of any kind before being published, but I've resolved to go back and fix the entire tale once I've reached the end. That means some of the wording will probably change, but I don't plan to retcon anything except to perhaps remove some unused plot threads – I sometimes leave a bare thread in case I need to make a reference later in the story.

The difference between the posting here and that of the original version on the Katawa Shoujo forums is that this will be the perfect version once it's finished. Since I can't really go back through the forum thread and fix up the early chapters without going insane, I'll reserve that process for this location, which is much more conducive to that kind of editing. The first two chapters presented here already went through that kind of change, although I've noted some things I'd rather like to alter in their present form as well – it's an ongoing process.

Anyway, this foreword has turned into a bit of a history lesson, but that might be what a foreword is for – I honestly don't know. What I do know is that after 18 months and 436,000 words (as of Jan 30, 2014), I think I'm entitled to reminisce a little. When this is all over I'll probably write a similar footnote – similar to how I've posted headers and footers on all the chapters – but I still have a number of chapters left to write. The footnote will probably go into more detail, but I don't want to spoil anything for a new reader.

For now, I'd just like to mention that I've had several people helping with this production, although I don't know any of their real names: Hoitash, Mirage_GSM, neio, Silentcook, Aura, Leaty, forgetmenot, BlackWaltzTheThird, and probably about a dozen other forum regulars who have offered critiques, edits, advice, research information, and other forms of support. Without their help, there would be several more broken parts of the story, improper cultural references, and other problems that I may or may not have ever realized existed.

Now that I've gone and outed all my sources – or many of them, anyway – I'll just let you get to the story.