Thank you all for your support. I actually made it this far. I actually finished this book!
I was a little dazed.
As I typed the four words "Afterword," my feelings were truly a tangled mess.
One night the year before last, I received my seventeenth rejection email. At the time, I was really disheartened and felt that I probably just wasn't meant to write books.
When I was on the verge of giving up, an idea suddenly popped into my head, and I sat down and finished the opening in one night.
It might sound a little dramatic, but it really wasn't. This had already happened seventeen times. I was someone who gave up easily, and every failure left me disheartened.
Fortunately, I was pretty thick-skinned. I would only feel bad for a little while before finding the courage to try again.
It was still Editor Jianan who pulled me in and gave me this opportunity. Speaking of which, I feel a little sorry for him. When he picked me up, my only thought was: "Is this editor really good enough? Would he accept a manuscript that had been rejected again and again?"
Back then, I even specifically checked whether there were any books with similar subject matter on Sanjiang. After looking through so many rounds and finding none, my heart sank.
But once I had made up my mind, I had to write it. Honestly, I had already decided that if no one read it, I would treat this book as something written for myself.
At the time, I really hated all that stuff. It always felt like having to write an epigraph for an 800-word assigned essay on the college entrance exam, so I deliberately went against it in every overt and subtle way. The protagonist's name