It was time to go premium—today.
Thank you all so much for supporting me along the way.
You pulled me back from the edge of collapse. At the very least, you let me know that there were still people reading what I wrote.
In the past, I was always chasing gimmicks in my writing. Honestly, it was exhausting—exhausting, exhausting, utterly exhausting!
Every time I closed my eyes and opened them again, it was a new day, and I had to come up with another gimmick. I'd spend an entire day writing, agonizing over 4,000 words for ten hours. Every day, I had to figure out some new trick, always anxious—anxious that if I didn't write like this, readers would abandon me and leave.
In the end, when the gimmicks could no longer be sustained and the readers really did leave me, I—who had realized it long ago, who understood better than anyone that this would happen sooner or later—was the most panicked, the most afraid, the least able to accept it.
What I couldn't accept wasn't that the readers had left, but what their leaving represented—
Was I only capable of filling my stomach by picking through other people's leftovers? Without gimmicks, was what I wrote just a pile of shit? What was the point of my existence? I'd looked up so much information, put in so much effort behind the scenes, designed so many interesting plots—so why were there always people cursing me?
So—
I clicked on the avatars of the people cursing me and saw their more than 2,000 days of author experience and zero words of fiction written. Gradually, I understood something.
I stopped chasing gimmicks. I decided to seriously write a book that I wanted to write. As for those cursing me—curse all you want. I