Summary of the first volume and belated remarks
The first volume was finally finished. I looked at the word count in WORD. It was 697,860 characters excluding spaces, which is nearly 700,000 words.
I did originally plan to write the campus chapter in detail and seriously, but I didn’t expect that there would be so many words in the end.
And in fact, this campus chapter is not a complete campus chapter. After all, it lacks a lot of campus life scenes, and there is relatively little explanation of Hu Lai's campus life except football.
But there is no way. If it is really that much, I estimate that it will take one million words to stop it.
It's ok, but not necessary.
After all, this is not a novel about campus alone. If I wanted to write about campus alone, I should start a new book instead of doing this in this book.
Therefore, according to my plan, using the two national competitions as the main line and writing a complete story about Hu Lai's growth on campus, I have achieved my goal.
Next comes the professional football chapter, which is also the highlight of the book.
I will also try to show you a completely imaginary world in the following stories - to be honest, I don't have much confidence now and I don't know if I can satisfy everyone, but I will try my best. I know this is difficult, very difficult, because I have seen comments like "It's completely empty? There is no sense of substitution" in the feedback more than once.
But I still want to try.
Just like Hu Lai, I don’t know whether my career will be successful, but I have to try, right? How will you know if you don’t try?
As for why the campus chapter of Novice Village is so long, I have explained it before in Chapter 49 "The Gate of the New World", so I won't go into details here.
In short, after I finished writing it, I looked back at the first volume and felt that it was relatively successful in writing Hu Lai's start as a player in a realistic and credible way.
I gradually grew from a rookie who was ridiculed and ostracized and knew nothing to a person who could compete with strong enemies and even be chased by strong enemies. I wrote about this process.
Next comes the professional football chapter.
At the end of the first volume, I used the words of Hu Lai's father and Li Ziqiang to tell Hu Lai about the risks of professional football. This actually represents part of my opinion - I don't want to write this book in a way that relies only on the enthusiasm of the middle school students to ignore the existing problems and forcefully exaggerate "dreams are invincible" and "dreams are amazing". story.
Maybe it’s because you are older and have seen a lot of helplessness in society, so you are more realistic, right?
It is indeed great to have a dream, but dreams must be put into practice before they can take root. But how easy is it to get it off the ground? If dreams are so easy to come true, then why are dreams valuable?
I didn’t end up writing the first volume as Hu Lai relied on his championship and performance to convince his father in a few words to get him to agree to take the path of professional football. In the end, the family was in harmony and everyone was happy. Hello, me, everyone. Well, it's also based on this reason - unrealistic, impossible, and too childish.
After all, I am now the father of a seven-year-old child, and I can somewhat understand the mentality and thoughts of a father.
It is not easy for an adult whose three views have been fixed to be persuaded. I have seen this on Weibo in recent years...
Not to mention that the person trying to persuade him was his own son, a character who naturally said in his mind, "What does a little kid know?"
His own experience also made him not believe his son's vision and expectations for the future, and would only treat them as childish and innocent fantasies, and treat them with sincere disdain.
At the same time, as a very controlling father, he will naturally react violently when his son resists his control.
I know that writing about a father-son quarrel and trying so hard to portray a character who is on the opposite side of the protagonist is not very laborious and will offend many people.
But I still wrote it this way, because Hu Lixin is a character that I really want to portray seriously. I don’t care whether the character I portray is likable or not - his role is not to be likable - what I care about is whether this person is real and whether he represents a part of such people in Hu Lai’s world. Is he a living person with his own thoughts?
By the way, Li Ziqiang is also such a character. He was not written to be likable, so I did not deliberately portray him in a positive image. As a result, everyone has a lot of dislike for him, which is normal.
Returning to Hu Lixin, I can even say that the focus and hidden main line of the first half of the book is entirely the grudges between father and son. It tells how a father with low self-esteem and sensitivity faces his own son, and tells a story about a man who has been in love for a long time. How can a son who becomes naughty under his father's pressure get along with such a father?
There is a line in Li Zongsheng's song "Newly Written Old Songs" that particularly touched me:
"It is very likely that two men will just look alike throughout their lives. Some are lucky and become close friends, while some are unfortunate and can only be A and B."
I was wondering if Hu Lixin and Hu Lai would become like this?
What should you do if you don’t want to fall into this cycle?
In fact, in the domestic chapter of the professional league, the knot between Hu Lai and Hu Lixin will gradually be untied. After all, there is still a career line between the two.
But it’s not just about having a successful career that will relieve your heartache.
I can’t spoil it now. I can only say that not long after I started the book, I had already figured out the plot of the father and son reaching some kind of reconciliation. I even named the specific chapter and was waiting for it. It's time to use it.
That was a big climax in my mind, and it was a scene that I sketched over and over again in my mind.
I look forward to writing it out for everyone to read.
Even when the book just came on the shelves and the results were not good, what kept me writing was that I wanted to write that picture, that story, and that chapter title for everyone to see.
Okay, that’s all I have to say about the first volume, and what follows is my acceptance speech.
※※※
This is a late review.
According to convention, every book should have a testimonial when it is put on the shelves.
Each of my previous books also had this kind of acceptance speech.
But this book doesn't.
Why not?
In fact, before this book is put on the shelves, I do plan to use my remarks to talk to you about it.
But reality is always full of surprises.
On the morning of May 1st, the day it was put on the shelves, I had just turned on my computer, and the Swans speaker, which had been in service for eight years, suddenly emitted a continuous burst of harsh high-frequency electronic whistling sound, which woke up my wife who had not yet gotten up.
And after I restarted and cut off the power several times, I had no choice but to admit that this speaker was completely broken and I had to buy a new one.
In fact, buying a speaker is not a big deal. For JD.com, if you place the order in the morning, it will arrive in the afternoon, and you will definitely get it the next day at the latest.
But this was like a very ominous omen, as if the army was about to set out, but suddenly a gust of evil wind broke the flagpole...
The results of my book after it was put on the shelves were very unsatisfactory. It can even be described as "horrible".
Although I said before I started the book that I didn’t care much about my grades, would I still be angry if my grades were good?
In particular, the data on the public version of this book - collections, recommendation votes, and the number of chapters - all look pretty good, which seems to indicate that everyone has accepted my attempt well, and the results after it is put on the shelves are worth it. expect.
It was under such a psychological expectation that the subscription results of the first chapter of the new book gave me a blow.
The first number I saw was a little over a thousand.
Then I took another look at it twenty-four hours later, and it was a little over one thousand five hundred.
When was the last time my new book was so poorly received on the shelves? I don’t know if the first order result of “Legend of Champions”, which had the worst performance among all my books before this, is lower than this number, maybe?
Even though I was mentally prepared, I expected that the score of this book would definitely be worse than my previous books, but I didn't expect it to be this bad.
First order of 1,500 within 24 hours...
I began to have doubts about my previously confident ideas.
Is my writing not good enough?
Was my imaginary idea wrong from the beginning?
Was my previous pace too slow?
Is there something wrong with my control of some plots?
Isn’t it...
I have a lot of thoughts and I'm so confused.
There are also some people who sarcastically say that I don’t know how high the sky is and want to get rid of real football. I really don’t know how much weight I have. Do you really think that my achievements and popularity in these years are all brought to me by my own novels?
Some people also left messages in the book review area asking me, as a platinum author, if I don’t even have high-quality products, is it embarrassing?
In short, the whole day when it was released on May 1st, I was in a daze and my mood was at its lowest point.
Naturally, I'm not in the mood to write any acceptance speech.
Faced with such dismal results, what other comments can you make? What else can I say?
It wasn't until an author friend who was on the shelves at the same time as me came to ask me about my results the next day that I realized that the scores of many authors on the shelves in this issue were far lower than my expectations and estimates.
We all know that something happened at that time, but we don't know if it was because of the impact of this incident.
It was only a long time later that I found out that starting from this year, every new issue of the book was released. The results of the public version seemed to be quite good, but as soon as it was released, it was cut in half as expected by the author. Is there any free reading in it? And the impact of piracy, I don’t know.
At that time, this author friend and I could only choose to comfort each other.
I said to him: "Don't worry about your grades. Just calm down and write a good book. Now that your grades are like this, the only thing left to do is write a good book."
He agreed.
But I quickly realized a problem: "But how can such results prove that what we think of as 'writing well' will definitely produce a 'good book'?"
The author friend was also stunned, and after a long time he sighed: "That's right. I always feel that my writing is quite good. I am very happy and passionate about writing, but the feedback on my results after writing is But told me that’s not the case..."
This is a very scary thing for us, that is, when the writing concepts, skills, and experiences that I rely on are not recognized, and when what I think is "good" is no longer "good", I How to continue writing? What can I use to convince myself that I am really writing in the "good" direction, rather than writing blindly?
I don't have an answer.
I also thought about whether I should speed up the pace and write the rest of the content according to that refreshing rhythm?
I quickly rejected this idea, because it would not make the book better, but would make the book nondescript.
Later, the new speakers arrived, and after a lot of trouble, I connected them to the computer, turned on the music player, and listened to the songs I had to listen to to code, trying to calm down my emotions.
I told myself, since the results were like this, and I didn’t know if my writing was really good anyway, I would just finish the book according to the original plan and rhythm.
Even if the results of this book are not good, at least I can tell the story and words in my heart completely, and leaving such a story can be regarded as an explanation for myself.
The only thing I'm worried about is that if my grades are too bad, I won't be able to stand it anymore and I'll finish the book ahead of schedule.
But my editor-in-chief, Chang Tian, is a good person. He is actively helping me promote the copyright adaptation of this book, hoping that this can alleviate the regret of unsatisfactory electronic subscription results. He has neither directly nor tactfully told me that he hopes I will Finish this book as soon as possible.
Therefore, since I am not worried about finishing the book ahead of schedule, I will write it well according to my definition of "writing well".
I wrote about Hu Lai's first national competition according to the plan and the existing rhythm. I didn't write about how he won the championship in the first national competition and then soared into the sky. According to the original plan, Luo Kai went to the professional team and Hu Lai stayed in the high school team.
Hu Lai is a sophomore in high school. After some hard training, he can take the lead and become the leading shooter of this team. Write about him killing everyone in the Anton Cup, showing the results of his hard training.
I wrote that he participated in the second national competition. According to my outline, he made it all the way to the finals and became the national champion, breaking Shuguang High School's dream of three consecutive championships and defeating Chen Xingyi.
It is written that even if he won these championships and honors, he could not change the conflict and relationship between him and his father. In the end, he could only choose to leave without saying goodbye and run away from home to continue pursuing his dream.
There is not a chapter in this chapter that I changed from my original plan because I was worried about grades. Basically, it can be said that I wrote the campus chapter completely according to my original ideas.
I no longer check the subscription results. I open the author backend every day just to upload new chapters or correct typos in old chapters.
Why are the grades bad?
I don't know, and I don't want to study it. This may be due to the general environment, or it may be my own problem: maybe it’s because I chose to write in a niche way on such a niche subject, or maybe it’s because my early pace was too slow and my emotions were too depressed. The protagonist is too frustrated...
It may be due to any one of these reasons, or it may be a combination of all factors.
In short, the results are just like this, do whatever you want. I just immerse myself in writing a book and just use it as a single machine to write out the stories in my heart.
Under such circumstances, Qidian gave me a big push, and then I discovered that the score of this book had been slowly rising... and it was almost reaching the high-quality level.
From the first order of 1,500, the average order was 1,200, gradually increased to the average order of almost 3,000 now, and the highest order is almost 4,000.
And there’s one more thing—the highest and average order numbers in this book are not far apart, only a few hundred.
What does this mean?
This shows that although there are not many people reading the book, the readers who followed the V subscription at the beginning have not lost much. They all stayed and kept up with the updates!
This was a great encouragement to me.
I don’t know if everyone in front of the screen can understand how I felt at that time. It was like I had been trudging alone in the darkness with my head down for a long time, and then with the help of a little light in the sky, I was surprised to find that there were many people walking with me all the time!
Then on the second day of the big promotion, Hu Lai's story crossed the 3,000 line of subscriptions and entered Qidian's premium channel.
At that time, I thought, I would write a testimonial for the launch and share with you my journey in the past two months.
Now it seems that it is quite rude for a platinum author to say so excitedly that his book has passed the quality line.
But after these two months, I feel that I still have reason to be proud of my current results.
I adhered to my original intention, I just took it so slowly and wrote two updates every day, and my grades actually got better little by little?
This book that was almost sentenced to death seems to be able to breathe again?
I don’t know if this result is a reason not to be terminated early from the perspective of website management.
I don’t know how shabby this achievement actually looks in the eyes of others.
But anyway, I am happy and satisfied.
I have completely finished the first volume of this book. Having such a result when I finished it is a reward for me.
I accept it gladly and accept it calmly.
The above is the late release of this book. I will continue to uphold my original intention of writing this story, write this story, write it completely, write out the joys and sorrows of everyone in the book, and write about their lives. , write a world.
Again, thank you for continuing to subscribe to this book, thank you for coming to support me, and thank you for joining me in witnessing the growth of Hu Lai and the birth of this world. (End of chapter)