Hello (hopefully) future K-Pop Idol Diaries readers. It’s
been 2 weeks since we kicked off promotions for our debut light novel series
this summer. Have you explored the website reveal? If not, we really encourage
you to do so as it’s the best place to get answers to questions such as:

These are the interesting questions
we’ve been getting on social media since we launched, which is interesting since we always include the
link, but we’re learning without clear messaging in our promotions, people tend
to forgo getting questions from the site and ask directly in interesting ways. We plan on starting a
concurrent blog series on our interesting
self-publishing journey to share and get tips from others authors in our boat.

But anyway, for those who have
visited the site, thank you! That means you most likely have already seen the
profile of the first SKS-7 member reveal – the group leader Shine! It’s
appropriate that Shine would be the first character reveal, as he’s the second
character after Gigi we thought of back in 2017 - although he has gone through
a few changes since his original incarnation. For example, Shine was originally
the oldest member of the group, which was one of the contributing factors to
him being the leader, but after developing the other characters, Shine’s age
lowered to his current age of 18. We guess we gave a hint that he’s not the
oldest member of SKS-7 (he’s yet to be revealed), but we can confirm that Shine
also isn’t the maknae (youngest member). Here’s an early B&W sketch of
Shine back from 2017, which reflects an arguably more mature look – the art
style was also still in development, too.

One constant about Shine that he
retains from his original incarnation is that we knew he had to have pink cotton candy hair. Why? Well, simply because a lot
of our fave idols have sported pink hair at one time or another, and it really
stands out. If Shine is to make a strong first showing, then we thought pink dyed
hair would be a good way for him to make a lasting impression. Here’s another
early concept art of Shine in 2018, and as you can see, he and pink hair go way
back.

Aside from being the group leader, Shine’s other roles in
the group is lead rapper and main dancer, so Shine is quite well-rounded and
he’s known amongst One-Shot trainees as being able to do it all. So it’s no
surprise that when we thought of Shine, the idea was that he was “Mr. Perfect”
which of course means there’s something behind his perfect image. We will
definitely unravel those layers in future chapters, so we hope you’ll stick
around to see the character development of Shine and eventually grow to love
him as the leader of SKS-7.

Fun
Fact: Shine’s real name, Tae-yang, means “sun” in Korean, which is
the inspiration for his nickname.