My daughter’s favorite shows are anime, and her favorite books are light novels and manga. Specifically, she enjoys isekai, a subgenre of the manga/anime/light novel culture.
In isekais, the main character finds themselves in a different world, be it by reincarnation or by teleportation. Usually, the protagonist has some spirit guide that brings them to the new world, and often times, that world runs on video game or board game mechanics. If you enjoy this book and want to look into some anime that falls in the same genre, here is a list of what my daughter watches: Rising of the Shield Hero, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, So I’m a Spider so What, Didn’t I say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life, and Kuma-Kuma Bear.
As I watched these shows with her, I was writing Delivered: True Stories in Pizza Delivery, and a pizza themed isekai began to form in my head, but I wasn’t set on writing it until one day when my daughter came home from school. She explained to me that the librarian at her school said my books were too big to be in an elementary school library, and she begged me to write something that could go in her school’s library.
The next day, while she was at school, I wrote out the first two chapters to this book. When she came home, we read them together, talked about them, and discussed where she wanted the story to go. At this point, she began to draw sketches of the characters and give them names, including this book’s villain. On page 198, I included a drawing of said villain done from her original pencil work.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
When my daughter left for school the next day, I outlined the book in full and set a goal of doing one to two chapters a day. Each day when she returned home, the first thing she wanted to do was read those chapters with me, providing me plenty of motivation to keep to my writing goal. As we read together, I did my first round of edits and incorporated her notes for further chapters. Over the next three weeks, I wrote the rough draft of this book and edited the second draft.
After we finished the second draft, I rushed to finish four more drafts, running the manuscript through different types of editing software. Exactly one month after I began writing, I finished my sixth draft and sent the book to the amazing BETA reader volunteers I mentioned in the acknowledgements, and we began to commission artwork based on my daughter’s drawings. I should note that at some point during the book’s creation, my daughter and wife did the uniform designs for the pixies, Pete, and Zoey, so the artists had plenty of concept drawings from which to draw inspiration.
The cover artist—Manuel Aguila—had done all four of my Luke Coles covers and it was great to work with him again. He always seems able to read my mind and draw exactly what I am thinking.
In the end, many creative people, test readers, and editors helped to create this work. The most important of those—to me—was my daughter. I’m proud and excited to share this story that she and I created together.
Welcome to the world of Round.
[https://storage.googleapis.com/production-domaincom-v1-0-2/962/418962/HNoiSPZo/17b1ffeebf6c413d8ba73c6b5b08cb4a]