Like most first-time authors, I always thought that The Diary of Modern Cinderella was already perfect enough at the time of publishing. But after having it available for sales for more than a year, I’ve decided to rewrite The Diary of Modern Cinderella a month before NaNoWriMo 2016 began.

To be honest, I should’ve attempted to rewrite The Diary of Modern Cinderella a long time ago. But at that time, I was only thinking about publishing new books.

So, the idea of rewriting The Diary of Modern Cinderella never crossed my mind until I started recording an audiobook version for The Diary of Modern Cinderella.

At first glance, I thought that the book would only need a minor editing. But I was struggling to make the storyline coherent with the original work when I attempted to edit the prologue.

After struggling to edit the prologue, I felt that it was much faster to write the whole book from scratch instead. And it was much better too.

Why rewrite The Diary of Modern Cinderella now?

To be honest, I don’t feel like rewriting the book. It wasn’t easy to write the original one. And I was worried that people who loved the book wouldn’t like the new version.

So, I didn’t think about rewriting it until later on.

After a long thought, I’ve decided to proceed with rewriting The Diary of Modern Cinderella because of these reasons.

The book was just plain horrible

After writing Twisted Destiny and the first book from the Trigger Locked series, I realize that The Diary of Modern Cinderella doesn’t have the same quality as my other books.

I can list down all the flaws that I come across when I reread the book. But it’s obvious that there’s a huge gap between The Diary of Modern Cinderella and my other books.

Well, it can’t be helped since it was my first novel. And not to mention, it was my first time writing fiction too.

I want The Diary of Modern Cinderella to have the same quality as my other books. And the current one is just plain amateurish.

Some parts of the storyline doesn’t make sense at all

I have no idea what was I thinking when I wrote the book. Sure, it’s fiction. And it’s alright if some parts of the storyline don’t make sense at all.

But The Diary of Modern Cinderella isn’t the kind of book where you can chuck the common sense out of the window.

It may only be a fiction book. But I want the book to have a closer sense of the reality.

Awhile back, I was watching a Malay romance drama adapted from a novel. In one part of the storyline, the female protagonist’s mother and the male protagonist’s father died when they were in Tokyo.

And to my surprise, the cause of their death was the horrible blizzard that struck Tokyo during their stay.

I was curious if it was possible for people to die because of the blizzard. So, I did a rough Googling about such weather condition.

Sure, many people died during the blizzard. But they died because of the blizzard-related accidents.

I didn’t find any news about people died because of the low temperature, though.

Well, it was a different story if they were climbing mountains at that time. It wasn’t unusual to hear the news about climbers who died because of the sudden change in the weather.

It made sense if they weren’t in Tokyo when the blizzard happened since the blizzard in other parts of Japan tend to be far worst than the one in Tokyo.

But dying in Tokyo because of the blizzard? The blizzard in Tokyo isn’t that terrible compared to other places in Japan.

Sure, it was horrible. But it wasn’t that bad when you compare it elsewhere.

Going back to the Malay drama, their parents died because of the extremely cold temperature in Tokyo. Even if they lost power, at least they could duck themselves under kotatsu and plaster as many heating pads as they want on their body.

Japan has many ways to survive the winter without jacking up your electricity bill. For me, their cause of death didn’t make much sense to me at all. And this is Tokyo we’re talking about.

On top of that, their parents aren’t even poor like Rinne from Kyoukai no Rinne. They were a wealthy family. So, I bet that they didn’t just have a kotatsu in the house they stayed. They might live in a house with a heating floor too.

It’s common for the new luxury, fully-furnished apartment to have a heating floor. Even if they don’t, these kind of apartmanets will have a proper insulation to make people warm during the winter season.

So, I doubt that people who live in that kind of apartment will die because of the low temperature. If they do, no one would want to live in Hokkaido anymore.

I know that it sounds more like I’m bashing the novel because it gives Tokyo a bad name. But I’m saying it to illustrate the flaws in The Diary of Modern Cinderella.

I realize that some parts of the story in The Diary of Modern Cinderella doesn’t make sense at all because I didn’t think thorough enough about the characters’ thought and actions in every situation.

The last thing I want is people complaining that I write without thinking hard enough.

With this in mind, expect that there’ll be a slight difference with the original storyline.

But don’t worry, the inciting incidents in the book will remain the same.

I’m changing the genre for this book

To be honest, I have no idea what genre would fit for The Diary of Modern Cinderella when I wrote the book.

The only genre I can think of was Young Adult (YA) category.

But then again, other authors would argue that YA is not a genre. Labeling the book as YA is more like classifying readers by age group. And they’re right about that.

Since the book itself did talk a lot about the psychological aspect of the main character, then the book should be YA psychological novel.

I only considered The Diary of Modern Cinderella as YA until I used Author Checkpoint to identify the keywords and genres for the book.

That was when I found out that The Diary of Modern Cinderella was close to the suspense genre.

So yes, the new genre for The Diary of Modern Cinderella is YA psychological suspense.

The change in genre for The Diary of Modern Cinderella makes it a lot easier for me to introduce myself whenever I meet people.

Instead of saying that I write YA novels, I can now say that I write thriller and suspense novels. Except for Twisted Destiny, the rest of my books are in that genre.

For some reason, people just assume that YA books are something like the shows you’ve seen on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.

They don’t seem to associate YA with something similar to shounen anime and manga.

When to expect the release of the new version

The Diary of Modern Cinderella is currently in the copyediting and proofreading phase as I write this blog post.

So, I don’t have any tentative date when the new version will be coming out.

But you can expect that the book will be released either at the end of April or early May this year.

Just like my other books, The Diary of Modern Cinderella will be available in ebook, print and audiobook format. And you can get the book at your favorite retailers.

If you’re on my mailing list, I’ll let you know about it through email.

But if you haven’t joined my mailing list yet, you can sign up here:

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P.S If you’re supporting my Patreon campaign, the book will be available right away for downloads. But you may have to wait for awhile for the print book, though.

I can’t say when the audiobook version will be coming out. But I’ll do my best to have it released by the end of this year.

Edit: The Diary of Modern Cinderella is already available for sale. You can choose to buy the book directly or at your favorite book retailer right here.