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His and my breakfast
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I thus decided to write the protagonist, a youth, as being interested in astronomy.
I had been reading literature on the subject, and it occurred to me that I couldn't remember when the last time I had been to a planetarium was.
It must have been when I was in middle school.
Were there even planetaria still around today?
My editor looked into it and found there were quite a few.
So I decided to go and have a look for myself.
It was a world apart from the planetaria of my youth.
The footage was incredible.
It was super realistic.
However, thinking about it rationally, I had never been on an outer space walk, so I began to wonder if what I was seeing was, in fact, "realistic."
All the same, riding a comet around the cosmos and waving at the sun, stammering as we seemed to careen close to nearby stars, and moving my body instinctively to what I saw on screen to avoid "obstacles" was something weirdly fascinating.
What the planetarium showed me was a world on a truly vast scale.
It was so big, I almost felt dizzy.
I wondered what it would be like for an anxious youth to witness those vast cosmos. Suddenly, in my mind's eye, I vividly pictured that youth.
It was at that moment that I had my protagonist.
I chose to make the contrasting character a lazy cook.
The world of cuisine is incredibly complex, and you can take it in any direction as deeply as you want to go.
At the same time, if you choose to cut corners, you can also make a dish in an incredibly simple, abbreviated fashion.
Today we have convenient semi-prepared foods and seasonings like the pros use.
There are even foods finely cut and ready to go and parboiled.
I am one such devout and grateful user of these products.
I came to think that cooking is almost like the polar opposite of the world suggested by astronomy, so I thought it would be interesting to make the other character a cook.
This makes for a very intuitive, realistic context that is familiar to us.
We have to eat to survive.
Thus we cook and prepare food.
From the scale of the cosmos, even a whole, fulfilling day of delicious food is but an instant, a spark.
It is the work of humans to treat these fleeting moments as precious and meaningful.
I realized I wanted to tell the story of these passionate cooks and their world.
