The New Year was almost here, so let me say a few words from the heart. ☞💔 ☠🌷
A reader asked me, "It's the New Year, and everyone else is taking a break. You're a veteran writer-why push yourself this hard? What are you fighting for? Do you still care about rankings as much as the youngsters do?"
He didn't understand what was on Octopus's mind.
Octopus had been writing professionally for twelve years, with probably more than twenty million Chinese characters across many books. Yet when I clicked on my author name on Qidian and looked at the works section, I could see only one book: "Medical Dominion."
Octopus's first paid-release book, "**," was gone. My first historical novel to average over ten thousand subscriptions, "Three Palaces and Six Courts, Seventy-Two Consorts," was gone too. "Officialdom of the Medical Way," which ran to eleven million characters and likewise averaged over ten thousand subscriptions, was also gone. Then "Food and Sex Under Heaven," an urban novel that had reached 1.7 million characters and had only just raised its curtain, was gone as well. Had I been able to finish it, its average subscriptions would certainly have exceeded ten thousand. So many new readers wondered: why did a veteran author who had been writing for twelve years have only one book to his name? What had he been doing all those years?
Octopus had kept writing. Though I wrote part-time, I had never slacked off. Yet when I looked back, all the heart's blood I had poured into those years had somehow become 404s. What a sorrow that was. A work represented more than just the work itself; it also represented the readers behind it. Gathering readers around each work required a difficult process, and this time I had to start