Forgive me | Legend of Zelda FF | ENG

26 ~ Afterword

Guys, the story is over.

I can hardly believe it myself, I actually made it.
I have to admit, not all that glitters is gold and I had enough difficulties with the story here. At the beginning I really had my doubts, because I didn't know if I could do it all; after all, I'm in the twelfth grade of a high school and will graduate in April 2022. But still I decided to write this story.

And believe me, it was the best decision of my life.

But I will try to make this a bit chronological, so you won't get lost while reading. But I can't guarantee anything, I'm just writing freely without any script.

Well, the first time I really thought about this story was at the end of July 2021. A good friend, who I also met here on Wattpad, was the first person I told about my idea. To write an advent calendar in December, which is separated from "Breath before the Wild" (BbtW), the story, which is also running on the side.

Pretty quickly I was excited about the idea, because I'll be honest, my head was bursting with ideas that I couldn't incorporate into BbtW. Also, in retrospect, I can now say that it really did me good to take a break from BbtW; not from uploading, of course, but from writing.

Funfact in between: This advent calendar was supposed to complement BbtW and tell backstories. But I discarded that idea pretty quickly when I got the right idea for a darker story concept.

Well, after I was sure that I wanted to write an advent calendar, I started planning. From the beginning, it was clear to me that Link should be possessed by Ganon's power and thus deceive Zelda. However, I expected to write about 1,000 word chapters. Oh God, how wrong I was.

At first, I kept the 1,000 words very well, but by chapter 15 at the latest, I realized that I needed to write a lot more to make the details and story relatively high quality (if you can even title my work that way :)).

That meant I started to write more, but the time I had taken for the story didn't increase. Accordingly, I got into quite a bit of stress, because the amount of time it took to write a chapter had tripled.
Now imagine, I'm sitting here in front of my laptop at chapter 16 and it's the December 06th 2021.
Stressful, wasn't it? Above all, the chapters at the time were simply no longer shorter, but increasingly longer.

I have to say, I had a lot of time, of course, but I still go to school, have my family and friends. So I had to keep myself busy with Wattpad from the end of July until December. Mostly this happened in the evenings from eight to ten o'clock or on weekends until midnight and beyond.

Since I am quite a scatterbrain and can't remember when I wrote what and where, I had to write down everything that happened. That meant I opened my notes app on my phone after each time I finished writing a chapter, whereupon I wrote down important characteristics about the characters in various folders and left chapter summaries. This also cost me extra time. On top of that, I also had to translate this story into English, so that you guys could read it. Of course I used a good online translator, but place names etc. all need to be edited and corrected.

(I was most upset when "Verheerung" was translated as Devastation even though it's called Calamity or when I was talking about the "Titanen" and the translator gave out titans even though they're called Divine Beasts XD)

To give you a rough estimate of how long I sat on a chapter until it was written, added to the notes and then still translated: roughly eight hours (not yet for the first chapters, since they were shorter).

If I now come back to the fact that I still wrote chapter 16 on December 06th 2021, then you can imagine my stress quite well.
Without further ado, I started writing in my free hours at school, when I finally had all exams finished. When I was at home, I did my homework and then got straight to work on the story. And I actually got there in time, even though chapters 23 and 24 both went online a bit late because the technology had also let me down.

But when I looked at it now, the effort and stress was really worth it.

To save the story and archive it on my laptop, I pasted it into a Google Docs document, which then also showed me the total word count and also gave page numbers.
If I were to print "Forgive me" as a book right now, I would have 54.186 words on 133 pages.
Pretty solid, actually, right?

And that was my journey with this story.
Crazy, but I'm so happy I did it. I hope you had at least as much fun reading it as I did writing it; whether you were always there for the daily upload or you found this story when it was already completed.

If you're looking for new reading material now, feel free to check out my profile, I have another Zelda story there called "Breath before the Wild". Basically, it's about how Link perceived everything that had happened before the Calamity erupted.

(But don't be surprised, this story is older than "Forgive me" and according to that my writing ability is not really great especially at the beginning, I think. BbtW I had started writing in 2020, however, I proofread each chapter before uploading it, so I hope it goes reasonably).

I would be happy to see you again; whether in BbtW or any other story I will upload here sometime in the future.
If you don't want to miss anything, you can easily follow my profile here on Wattpad and if you want to see more of me, feel free to check out my Instagram, there my name is bena0804 as well. Link is attached to the chapter here :D

With that, I've said it all.
I am so thankful to you guys for all the reads and votes that have come in one month here and I look forward to the continued journey with this account. I still have so many plans and who knows, maybe you would like to accompany me.

But now I say goodbye to you here, because this story has found its end.
I hope you had a lot of fun reading!

Until the next story!

~ Belana