1: Why I started writing
After countless trials and tribulations, my second novel finally stumbled its way into going premium.
My previous American comics fanfic went premium around the same time of year, too: late April to early May, when Jiangnan's damp, muggy weather left everyone irritable and the laundry never seemed to dry.
Looking back, two whole years had already passed.
When I finished my last book, I was brimming with passion, determined to leave fanfiction behind and make a name for myself in original fiction. Instead, I tried one genre after another without making so much as a ripple.
Yes, I couldn't even call the results mediocre.
For a while, this plunged me into serious self-doubt. I even began wondering whether I could still make a living from writing.
On the one hand, after trying so many genres, I genuinely hadn't found the direction that suited me best. On the other, I really had overestimated my abilities.
Perhaps because I've read far more comics than novels, my writing has a certain advantage when it comes to conveying a sense of panel-by-panel storytelling. Along with reasonably decent characterization and an ability to bring plots to a satisfying close, that's the value I can offer my readers.
Simply put, my work reads a little like comic panels. The character interactions are fairly lively and entertaining, the individual arcs probably won't fall apart at the end, and the foreshadowing gets paid off.
My shortcomings lie in worldbuilding, a lack of consistency in long-form storytelling, and the absence of a central thematic core running through the entire story.
Perhaps that's why I kept struggling to get anywhere with original fiction.
And so this book came into being. It wasn't a product of compromise, but an attempt to use fanfiction to test the