End-of-volume wrap-up
Volume One, [Ming Directorate Chief], came to 470,000 characters, pretty close to what I expected. The original plan was to end the first volume at around 500,000 characters.
I was fairly satisfied with the first half, but not so much with the second half, perhaps because the updates were rather inconsistent. You could see that in the number of readers subscribing to the latest chapters, too.
I was still struggling with writer's block even on last night's final chapter of the volume.
But life was full of things you could do nothing about.
When the book went premium in March, I was all set to shut myself away and focus on writing. Who could have guessed my family would introduce me to one blind date after another? Every few days, I had to go meet someone.
The latest one was even more outrageous-we went all the way to Xishuangbanna. The drive alone took seven or eight hours. All the fun was theirs; all I had left was torment and exhaustion...
My writing speed was reasonably good. When I wasn't blocked, work wasn't busy, or nothing was going on in my life, I could generally write two thousand characters an hour. But whenever something came up or I hit writer's block, there was nothing I could do. Sometimes I sat there for hours without managing to finish a chapter.
And I knew perfectly well what level I was at.
Sometimes, when you read something and felt it was padded, or complained, "What the hell is this?" that was basically something I had forced out while struggling with writer's block.
Because that was how webnovels worked: you had to make sure there would be an update tomorrow. So there were very few books that could maintain high quality in every