Well, Anomaly of Douluo had come to an end. I started writing this book on September 26, 2018, at 16:32, and finished it on July 7, 2019, at 19:40. It totaled 1.2 million words. If I'd padded it out a little more, it probably could have lasted a full year.
Strictly speaking, this was the author's first book. I had casually written a few before, but they all got abandoned after only tens of thousands of words. Sticking with writing for this long was probably the longest I'd ever persisted at anything besides staying alive.
I hadn't known before, but now I did: writing every day was genuinely exhausting. So, thank you to all the readers who subscribed legitimately and gave me the motivation to keep going.
I said from the very beginning that this book had been started on a whim, just for fun, so I never expected it to grow this long. The reason it even got signed was that, while writing, I lost motivation and casually clicked the button to apply for a contract.
Well, I never expected it to work. Before this, probably very few Douluo fanfics had ever been signed. That was something I hadn't expected, and probably something many readers hadn't expected either.
That was why this book had so many terribly flawed settings, driving away plenty of readers—for example, the martial souls, the female lead, the plot, and the writing style.
Leaving everything else aside, if I'd known the book could get signed, I definitely would have planned the plot better. Its results probably would have been much better too.
Of course, if Douluo fanfics could have been signed back then, there definitely would have been many more of them, and I probably wouldn't have written this book at all.
Next, let's talk