The beginning of a book was like the beginning of a relationship.
You didn't know what the future held, but you carried beautiful hopes and cherished beautiful fantasies, thinking you could write it this way, or that way.
After a few hundred thousand words, you discovered that so many things couldn't be written, and pressed on with your hands and feet bound.
The novelty faded, and daily updates became a dull, tedious ordeal.
When I was writing Little World and Poké Ball, I lived alone. My only company was a fish tank I had bought for a little over a hundred yuan.
It was an ultra-clear glass tank, one meter long, forty-five centimeters wide, and thirty centimeters high. Lava rocks and small, smooth black-and-white stones lined the bottom. The latter were called ocean jasper—a lovely name. Vallisneria took root, guppy grass grew, and there were cherry shrimp, four loaches, and guppies.
There had originally been six loaches. One day, I went to work, and when I came home, I found one missing from the bucket. But no matter how hard I searched, I couldn't find its body—not under the sofa, the fridge, or the coffee table. There was no strange smell, either.
At first, the loaches gave me headaches. They loved burrowing into the substrate. I'd just planted pennywort, and by the next day, they had dug it up and left it floating on the surface. Even if I tied it to a stone and sank it, they would nudge it back up. Later, I bought a sheet of plastic mesh, cut it to size, and fenced off the area where the vallisneria was planted, weighing down the top to make sure the loaches couldn't burrow in from either side.
Little by little, the vallisneria took root and grew.
I