Regarding Updates

First of all, I need to apologize to everyone.

I'm sorry.

These past few days, Salted Fish had been reflecting on my current creative state. It was terrible, completely a muddled mess—the more I wrote, the more tangled up it became.

It seemed outlines weren't suitable for every author.

Salted Fish had never made outlines when writing before, only kept a rough plotline in my mind. After carefully making an outline for this book, I had originally thought it would strengthen it. But as I wrote, I slowly realized it felt like I had entered a prison.

Plots that could originally branch out without limit had directly become a straight line between two points, turned into formulaic force-feeding.

Which characters had to appear in a plot, where each character's conflicts lay, what the protagonist had to do, what he would gain, and what method he would ultimately use to achieve his goal—all of it had been decided in advance.

Under this model, there was no way to shape the many-sided nature of supporting characters, and the plot would seem hollow. Worse still, what the outline boxed in wasn't just the plot, but also the inspiration that suddenly sprang up halfway through writing.

Before, when inspiration came, I only needed to follow it. With an outline now, I had to consider whether that inspiration would conflict with later plot developments. Then the more I wrote, the more tangled it became—what had been a single-minded path became blocked at both ends.

This showed in the book. Many plotlines simply weren't smooth, with a strong sense of disconnection.

It seemed outlines weren't suitable for Salted Fish.

It was like walking into a dead end. I would often finish a chapter, then delete the entire thing. Every day, the more I wrote, the more