Jing Jiu paused before he understood what she meant. Rather than pursue the subject, he asked, "How do you write a novel?"
Naturally, he was not asking about writing techniques or anything of the sort. Zhong Lizi explained, "There are two common ways to write now. One is consciousness writing: your consciousness fluctuations are recorded directly, then automatically rendered as text. The biggest problem with this method is that people's thoughts aren't under control, so all kinds of jumbled fragments easily turn up. Serious writers who win literary prizes like doing it this way, but commercial novelists rarely use it, because editing is too much trouble. Of course, another reason is that the equipment needed to record consciousness is too expensive."
"The other way?" Jing Jiu asked.
Zhong Lizi fetched something very small from her room that looked like a finger sleeve. "The other way is to use a remote-sensing pen."
With that, she demonstrated, slipping the sleeve onto her right index finger and beginning to twitch it rapidly. A line of text soon appeared on the computer's light screen, with hardly any errors or omissions.
"How is that different from using pen and paper?" Jing Jiu asked.
Zhong Lizi removed the sleeve and set it beside the computer. "It's faster than pen and paper, and cheap," she said earnestly.
Jing Jiu thought that just because he had no need to concern himself with something did not mean these mortals had no need either. He carried the computer back to his room.
Zhong Lizi withdrew her gaze from the tightly closed door and went into the kitchen to prepare that evening's dinner.
Bland and tasteless but healthy and nutritionally balanced, the nutrient blocks were just as awful even when washed down with tea.
Normally, she would certainly have complained a