A Summary for All the Yan Zus and Yifeis

When the book ended in May, I kept thinking about what I should write next.

Many friends told me that continuing to write urban fiction would be the safest choice, since I still had some popularity in that genre.

But honestly, that was the choice I resisted most.

I had written urban fiction for many years, and now I had more or less reached my own ceiling. If I kept writing it, I probably would not improve any further.

Because I had poured all my passion into Jiang Qin and Feng Nanshu, and drained myself dry in the process.

Writing another book would only mean reheating cold leftovers, continuing to draw on them, to draw on the people and things everyone loved.

But in my heart, those stories belonged to Jiang Qin and Feng Nanshu. I did not want to put another head on the same shoulders and give them to different characters.

After all, Feng Nanshu had influenced me too deeply. Even after the story ended, I could not stop thinking about her.

I knew that if I wrote a similar story in a similar world, her shadow would still linger in my heart.

I did not want to repeat a similar story. I did not want to stay in my comfort zone until I became outdated and was slowly forgotten by everyone.

So I chose another genre: xianxia.

In truth, I did not write xianxia for the reasons everyone assumed—not for adaptation rights, nor for greater profits. At the root of it all, I wanted to seek a breakthrough.

I wanted to try multiple perspectives, no longer confining the story solely to the protagonist, but adding another thread that drifted beyond the main point of view.

To put it plainly, when I wrote my previous book, I always felt that the world only seemed to move when Jiang Qin was moving. When he stopped, everything fell still.

So I began to wonder whether I could write a world that kept moving even while the protagonist was moving.

Some things might not happen because of the protagonist, yet everything was in motion, eventually converging into a vast thread that pointed toward a final destination.

The reason I had this thought was because I discovered my own shortcomings in my previous book.

I was not very good at handling multiple perspectives.

For example, in my previous book, I had actually designed Young Master Cao and Ding Xue's story to be quite sweet. But because I had kept writing along the protagonist's perspective, their story could not be smoothly woven into the main plot and could only be placed in the extras in the end.

There was also Zhuang Chen. I had always wanted to give him an ending in the main storyline, but I could not fit it in either.

The plot about the unsold fruit in Zhang Guangfa's household was also brushed over in a single stroke.

I realized that I seemed to only know how to write the protagonist's story, and that frightened me.

So I knew I was still green, still far from mastery, and still needed to keep cultivating myself.

I decided to be like I was just after graduation, forcing myself every week to do one thing I originally thought I had no interest in.

So I chose xianxia.

Writing this book had been difficult. I was extremely dissatisfied with myself, to the point that I might write one chapter three times. At present, my drafts folder already held tens of thousands of discarded words.

Earlier, when I wrote the part about Kuang Cheng in high school, some readers said, how could there be results overnight? The truth was that I had deleted three chapters where the protagonist went out to work, but forgot to revise the timeline.

Also, at the beginning, Old Qiu originally had a one-man scene where he knelt on the ground and begged someone, meant to highlight the contrast between life and death, but I deleted it in the end as well.

In fact, right up until today, I had still been continuously revising the earlier chapters.

Before I started this book, I had not thought about what kind of results it would achieve, nor had I expected it to be loved by everyone as much as my previous book was.

But it was very important to me.

Because I was tormenting myself, searching for a different road.

I said before in an interview that I was not a talented person. I had been writing for ten years, and six of those years had been spent falling flat on my face.

So all I could do was let the clumsy bird fly first, write what I was not good at, let those weaknesses expose my flaws, and then correct them.

Writing books was my profession. I had no other job and no other identity, so I had no way out.

That was why I cherished every book I wrote and every opportunity I had.

I did not want the ship of the new era to leave me behind.

So no matter how the results turned out, I would keep writing well.

Because I knew that what did not kill me would only continue to make me stronger.

This was my response to everyone's confusion over my change of genre, as well as a brief summary of the story so far, and also a thank-you to everyone for never leaving my side.

Finally, to repeat the old refrain: please vote with monthly tickets, please keep reading. For Lao Cuo during this new-book period, these numbers were still very important...or2