Thoughts on Going Premium

It would go premium at noon on July 30.

I won't say much more. Once it goes premium, I'll write 10,000 words a day for at least a month. If I can get used to it, I'll keep it up until the story is finished. If I fall even one word short, I'll take my own head off as an apology!

I might consider moving the release time for premium chapters to around 8 p.m., though I might also stick with the precise time of 11:50 p.m.

I'd also like to thank the author friends who gave me a final recommendation:

"Once There Was a Gluttonous Snake" — A Bowl of Dukang

"Rekindling the Green Years" — Honey Ji

"Goblin Dependency" — Xuli

Next is a brief message about going premium. Feel free to skip it if you're not interested...

Honestly, I didn't know what to say for a while.

I'd written these going-premium messages many times already. I'd long since lost that initial enthusiasm that came with doing it for the first time. I wasn't like I had been five years ago, tossing and turning all night because my book was going premium the next day.

But I still had a lot of feelings about it.

I think everyone could probably tell that although I was a Lv.1 newcomer account, I wasn't a rookie author.

The books I wrote were over on Thorny Hakimi. I won't say what they were; they were just here as a bit of background.

Ever since my previous book reached ten thousand subscriptions and ended at a million words in early 2024, I hadn't really produced any content.

I'd come up with maybe ten or twenty ideas, and I might have written two or three hundred thousand words' worth of openings, but not a single one had made it to publication.

It wasn't because those ideas weren't fun. I simply felt that my writing wasn't good enough. I was trapped in self-doubt, polishing a draft every day in hopes of making it a little better.

But after spending a month polishing any given idea, my enthusiasm for it would inevitably fade away, until I finally abandoned it completely and sealed it away in Writer Assistant.

...But people still had to make a living.

I was a full-time author. Going without work for over a year was a terrifying thing for me—these days, suddenly having no income was practically hell.

I couldn't even keep up with my mortgage payments!

As time passed, I grew more and more anxious. Just when I felt like I might rot away, a realization suddenly came to me—

Things were already like this... Would publishing a book really make your life any worse?

So I forced myself to begin a new round of writing.

After grinding away for nearly half a year, writing tens of thousands of words of setting and outline, and revising until I'd discarded fifty thousand words of drafts just to produce a twenty-thousand-word opening, I finally handed it to my editor.

I'd like to thank my editor, Mingyue, here. Thank you for waiting for me for so long.

A year and a half ago, I told him I was coming to Qidian. Yet it took me a year and a half to hand him the manuscript. That certainly made me an elite-level pigeon, which was rather something.

Then, I started the book.

Without caring about the results or anything else, focusing only on the story I wrote each day, I gradually recovered my rusty writing skills and began producing content normally again.

Perhaps because the daily task of writing updates took up so much of my time, I no longer had time to doubt myself...

Instead, that made my condition much, much better.

After more than a year—more than a year of being in a dry spell—I finally emerged from my self-doubt and difficulties, stepping once more onto a new creative path.

Perhaps it was also because I hadn't produced anything tangible for over a year. My urge to create was now wildly, explosively, tremendously stronger than it had been a year and a half ago. My mind was already full of stories!

At this point, there was no need to say any more.

I only hoped that the stories I wrote next could give everyone something to glance at during their leisure time after meals, something they found a little interesting and that brought them an easy smile.

I really hoped everyone would like this story.

2025/7/30

Dongshan Yuyu