Before I knew it, it was time for the premium launch—every author's most nerve-racking moment. It was like watching your wife give birth. Oh, I don't have a wife yet. Never mind, then.
Maybe Da Feng's results had been too good, which put a lot of pressure on me while writing this book—especially since I'd never written in this genre before. Everyone knows that writing relies on experience. Once you step out of your comfort zone, even a top author's experience stops being useful, so the risk of crashing and burning is high.
China Literature initially hoped I would write xianxia, but I refused. It wasn't that I insisted on stepping out of my comfort zone just to mess around. It was that all my inspiration, groundwork, and creative passion for xianxia had gone into Da Feng.
Lacking creative passion is painful. It's impossible to produce high-quality content that way. If you wanted me to write xianxia, I'd need a few years to let things settle.
Of course, I could write another Da Feng. I could even do many of its details better than Da Feng did. But that book would inevitably lack spirit. It was better to switch genres and reset a little.
I think that's why so many authors keep stepping outside their comfort zones. There isn't much reason behind it—they've simply written a certain genre until they're sick of it.
Life is long, and I have plenty more books to write. I can't obsess over xianxia alone. I need to write other genres too, to adjust myself.
There would inevitably be ups and downs along the way. That was perfectly normal.
When Spirit Realm first began, a lot of people weren't optimistic about it—readers, fellow authors, and so on. But its follow-up readership was actually very good,