I hit writer's block. The plot was perfectly clear, but I just couldn't find an interesting way into it. No matter how I rearranged things, it all came out as a flat, blow-by-blow account, and there wasn't much fun in that. I won't waste your Qidian coins on it, dear readers.
Well, one thing I wanted to explain was that some of you felt the last few chapters were filler, but they were actually setup and transitions serving the overall structure. If you looked at those chapters alone, they might seem padded, but if you stretched the timeline and plot out a little further, you would gradually understand why I, Xiaolou, had to write them. Please have faith in the padding skills of an old hand who's been in this business for twelve years. I know no fewer than nine techniques for padding a story, and I'm perfectly capable of giving filler a fresh twist and making it dance. There's really no reason I'd pad things so embarrassingly badly.
Honestly, even now, before I start writing each day, I still ask myself, What's the point of this chapter? What does it do for the structure of the whole story? Would leaving this section out make any difference? That's also why I often delete discarded drafts by the entire chapter. As for individual paragraphs, I'm basically deleting and revising them over and over as I type...
Often, I'll try three or four different ways of phrasing the very same sentence or word, searching for the feeling I want to convey. That's also why words sometimes go missing in the text, or even end up in the wrong order-it all comes from revising things over and over... After going over the same sentence five or six times, I basically become "word-blind" when