End-of-Volume Thoughts and Summary
As the title suggests, although this volume still has a few chapters left to finish, the main points have been written, so let's summarize it in advance.
Actually, there was a problem with the previous chapter. It was supposed to be a dual narrative: while He Wei Ni Ya played the Final Chapter to attract the attention of the Lord of Holy Sound, Bai Wei would descend in the basement in a phantom form to seize her body, and then play the movement himself to take away her ears. However, I was in a rush and wanted to finish the previous chapter as soon as possible, so I wrote the Final Chapter of He Wei Ni Ya's story in one go, which resulted in Bai Wei just watching the show.
But that's fine too, let He Wei Ni Ya have a solo performance, anyway, she's the last "volume master".
First, as is customary, let me first talk about my own problems and shortcomings.
1. The problem remains the same as the previous volume: insufficient writing skill. I still haven't achieved my ultimate goal of "connecting the entire worldview through a series of small but interesting stories." Many stories and characters are driven by the worldview and setting. This is especially evident in the later part of this volume, particularly with the character of Anita. She should have had more of a storyline to make her suicide at the end more impactful.
2. The outline is too idealistic and vague. This volume does have an outline, and it was basically completed according to it. However, the key points in the outline are not detailed enough. For example, Molly, the female musician who had a relationship with Ka Lun. Initially, I set her up as a pure, naive girl who was coerced into contracting a virus and ruining her life. But when I wrote this part, I realized that her character design overlapped a lot with the first half of the first volume. Writing it again would be too tedious, so I temporarily changed it to a scheming woman who would do anything to achieve her goals.
3. My mindset is too unstable. As you can probably tell, I'm the kind of writer who writes on an emotional level. When I find something engaging, I'm very motivated to write, but conversely, when something doesn't feel right, it becomes very difficult, especially during transitional scenes. This was most noticeable when transitioning from the Third Hospital to the First Academy. And if I receive negative comments during this process, I'm even more affected, and then I become even more eager to finish it quickly (this was the case with the first two chapters; seeing everyone criticizing the female lead, I couldn't sit still and wanted to finish that part of the story as soon as possible). This is probably my biggest problem.
4. Foreshadowing. Sometimes I take it for granted that foreshadowing doesn't need to be so obvious, that readers can easily spot it. This often leads to foreshadowing being buried too deep, making the final version seem like a hastily revised plot or outline, when it actually isn't. For example, the way He Wei Ni Ya plays the Final Chapter —I provided the steps, thinking readers should be able to connect them. So when the previous chapter was written, and everyone criticized the female lead for forcing the male lead to confront the Lord of Holy Sound, I was completely baffled. I didn't understand why that conclusion was reached.
The most obvious point was in the previous volume, where Yong Xin was described as Jie La Er's son, which seemed abrupt to many. But from my perspective, it should have been quite obvious, because I described Yong Xin as very "young" more than once, and Jie La Er's son was the only young person in Xiaoxing's group. Of course, looking back now, I realize I was being too presumptuous.
The above four points are beyond dispute and pertain to my own issues.
Next, let's talk about the female protagonist He Wei Ni Ya. She's a rather polarized character. Unlike Jie La Er's rather ordinary evaluation in the previous volume, He Wei Ni Ya in this volume is clearly someone who is both liked and disliked, making her a polarized character.
In my opinion, the biggest reason for this is that He Wei Ni Ya is not an appendage of the protagonist. She has her own clear purpose, and she is trying to use the protagonist. This makes many readers who are completely on the protagonist's side feel that He Wei Ni Ya is an ungrateful wretch. However, in my setting, it would be wrong for someone like He Wei Ni Ya, who was born this way, to be easily tamed by the protagonist. Even though the protagonist saved her life, the problem is that she doesn't value her life. She just wants to explode with the Holy Sound and "kill" all the musicians. That's why she disagrees with the protagonist at the last moment. After she is certain that she will not see the protagonist kill the Holy Sound (she has confirmed this several times), she decides to do something in her dying moments.
As for the accusations that she's hypocritical, incompetent yet constantly jumping around, that's not really a problem. She truly only has so much ability; for example, her early killings were always self-destructive. Her knowledge and understanding, compared to the entire Holy Sound group and Bai Wei, are indeed insignificant. To achieve her goals, she will indeed need to use any means necessary, including those involving Bai Wei.
Of course, the decline in people's perception of her is partly due to my writing skills and some poorly written plot points, which is indeed my fault.
But the character of He Wei Ni Ya was decided before I started writing, including the part where she fights back against Bai Wei.
Personally, I really like this character, but of course, I won't write characters like this again in the future.
Because writing is indeed very tiring and thankless, especially since her identity as a woman makes many of her actions more sensitive (I won't go into details about this).
Finally, let me mention this book again.
As I just mentioned, He Wei Ni Ya should be the last symbiotic "volume master" in this book. Because I've discovered a problem I can't solve with this book, which is that with my writing style, the host of each volume is actually more like the protagonist of that volume. This leads to the problem that I can't guarantee that everyone will like the host of each volume.
Like He Wei Ni Ya, people who like her find her quite interesting, while people who don't like her find her very annoying, which leads to a problem.
That is—I select readers for each volume.
This is a very serious problem, much like in many infinite flow novels, but mine is even more extreme, with the protagonist's involvement being even less, so the drawbacks of infinite flow are amplified in my case. If the protagonist's involvement is too high, then the host will find it difficult to stand on their own, easily becoming a puppet that the protagonist can attack wherever they want, which makes the writing very uninteresting.
That's why at the end of this volume I gave the protagonist a barely usable body, at least he can have some mobility, and we'll see how it goes from here on out.
However, this will greatly shorten the length of the book. My initial plan is to write about 1.5 to 2 million words, which means about six months to go.
We'll see. Let's think about the next volume first. As my first book on Qidian, and also my first original book to achieve success, I want to try more with this book, hoping that each volume can bring everyone a different experience.
As for the merits of this volume, I won't go into them; let's see what everyone thinks.
But personally, I think the improvement is in the combat. I went from not being able to write at all to being able to write at least a little bit (during which time I completed five Soulslike games and Souls-like games in a row, haha), so the writing style might sound a bit like a game?
There are still a few chapters left to finish this volume. I'll see if I need to take another break. Writing this book is really exhausting.
The second and third volumes are both around 400,000 words each, but the next volume will be much shorter, probably about the same length as the first volume. I plan to write a short story to balance it out.
That's all.