Taking half the night off; I'll make up the update during the day.
I wrote all night, but when I started polishing it, I kept feeling the reading experience was still missing that final spark. So I deleted it outright. I'll turn in early tonight and make up the update tomorrow.
Actually, deleting drafts wasn't some kind of craftsman's spirit—it was a writing mindset.
The reason my updates were so often late now was that I couldn't stop every chapter from charging straight toward five or six thousand words. It was because I always felt I could still revise this chapter, still dig deeper into the details, still find more places to reasonably slip in jokes.
Every reader had different things that made them laugh, different things they could get. That required me to add elements of joy from different angles and in different ways.
Before posting each chapter, my mindset wasn't "Finally finished," but rather... "Ah, this is where my current skill level stands. This is already above the eighty-point standard of what I can write. Post it. I can still improve later"...
That wasn't a lack of confidence, either. It was more like I'd developed this writing habit of "never knowing satisfaction." I always wanted to give you esteemed readers better stories and smoother prose.
From the day this book, Senior Brother, began until now, every chapter and every small plot beat had been carefully polished. I didn't want to pad the word count, didn't want to stretch out fight scenes. I wanted to try solving a problem from different angles, so I could give you esteemed readers that fresh feeling of "What a revelation" and "How did I not think of that?"
Throughout this process, I was also constantly trying different approaches and different ways of shaping