The main story was finished! I hadn't written an afterword yet, and there was a lot I wanted to say.
I finished it the day before yesterday. Ending it was partly a spur-of-the-moment decision, but I'd written everything that needed to be written.
After the Blue Star arc ended and we moved into space, I said the interstellar arc wouldn't be very long, and there wouldn't be another change of setting. That would have been too much padding, and even I'd have felt sick writing it.
The whole book came to 1.3 million Chinese characters, which was what I'd expected.
This was also my first book to pass a million characters. My own assessment of this book was: written by a flop author, so please don't bash me. If you don't like it, just close it.
Before writing this book, I really was a flop. My longtime readers knew that. My previous book hovered around thirty thousand active readers for ages.
As a flop author, you shouldn't expect gorgeous prose, an amazing plot, or meticulously controlled pacing from me.
But even if I was a flop, I did my best. I wrote this book as well as I could.
Why did I write this book?
Back when I was just a reader, I liked apocalypse novels too. I loved watching the protagonist enter a supermarket and gather supplies, that wonderful sense of coming away with a haul. When the protagonist found food and drinks, I felt satisfied too.
My first book was an apocalypse novel, actually. Ha, Tribal Conflict: Apocalypse Home. My writing was immature, and I didn't know what a reader dealbreaker was.
Even when I was a reader, I didn't know that the biggest dealbreaker in apocalypse fiction was a bleeding-heart protagonist.
That book wasn't all that bleeding-heart.