However...
Utaha Kasumigaoka did not know that Your Lie in April, Pancreas, and the other story ideas Sogo Doma had suggested were, in a sense, acclaimed works that had already proven themselves in the market. Of course, great works were still created by people, and there was no reason Utaha Kasumigaoka could not create something even better than Your Lie in April and the others.
After all, Utaha Kasumigaoka was second to none!
The problem was that she was too young-or rather, she did not have enough writing experience. Sure, her earlier Love Metronome had met the standards for publication, but what about its sales?
Even setting sales aside, the sheer agony she had gone through while writing the second volume of Love Metronome made it clear that she could not handle a long-form story.
Still, that was not really her fault. One look at the title Love Metronome should have made it obvious that it was a love story. And therein lay the problem: had Utaha Kasumigaoka ever been in love? Forget dating-she had barely even interacted with boys...
Although she had forced out the first volume using her hopes and fantasies about love, fantasies were ultimately just fantasies. She had never been on a date, so how could she write a dating scene? She had never really connected with anyone, so how could she write interactions between people? Perhaps...
She could force herself to write all of that through imagination. But the most important problem remained: she had never been in a relationship, so how could she write about the sweetness and heartache that came after getting together?
That was precisely why Utaha Kasumigaoka had gotten so painfully stuck while writing the second volume of Love Metronome. She genuinely did not know how!
Still, this showed that although