In yesterday's Author's Note, I posted two leave notices in a row, but apparently many readers never read the Author's Note. To keep uninformed readers from waiting all night, I'm posting a standalone leave notice here.
There won't be an update today. You'll have to wait until tomorrow.
Not updating on a Saturday—I feel terribly guilty.
I felt so guilty that I cried. Really, I'm not lying to you.
But there was truly no way around it. For one thing, I had something important to deal with today. For another, I'd been updating continuously for too long and was exhausted in both body and mind. I needed to adjust my condition and pace.
Let me ramble a bit.
I'd actually been planning this book for a long time—more than half a year.
But before publishing it, I wanted to throw it away.
At the time, I already had more than seventy thousand words in reserve, and I'd revised them four or five times. Some chapters had been completely rewritten repeatedly. I'd worked myself nearly to death revising them.
During that period, I saw blood vessels filling the whites of my eyes whenever I looked in the mirror while washing my face.
Everything was ready. I was about to publish the book, yet I suddenly couldn't come up with a title.
I started thinking of titles in the morning. I came up with more than fifty in all, one after another, and then sat there hesitating.
By afternoon, I broke down. Excitement turned to dejection, and dejection turned to despair. I couldn't find a single satisfactory title for the entire day. Every title gave me the feeling that it was lousy.
I remember reading a book on screenwriting theory that said if you couldn't summarize your script in one fitting sentence,