Get up and chat with everyone
PS, this is a single chapter I wrote before going to bed after finishing the text last night. I only posted it after getting up today.
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The war between China and South Korea is not over yet. I am sorry that with my current ability, the outbreak can only last so long.
When I said this, I thought of when I wrote "The Hero of the Forbidden Zone" and "The Winner is King". I wrote three, five, and ten updates a day, and I felt a sense of "the past is like the wind".
I think back then, Lin Hai Tingtao could update one million words a month and 25,000 words a day for ten consecutive days...
Back then, I was also an author who could write 4.6 million words in only ten months.
And now the amount I write in a year is not even half of that.
Some people say that I am not short of money, so the speed has dropped.
Really not, who would mind having too much money?
As long as I can increase my speed and update it three or five times a day, can my book's performance be like this?
But I really can’t write quickly.
On the one hand, it is due to physical reasons that it is difficult for me to think about sitting in front of the computer and typing for more than ten hours a day without being distracted when I was writing "The Winner Takes All".
Nowadays, I may write for half an hour before withdrawing from the state. This may be a sign of low energy.
On the other hand, as I grow older, more family responsibilities fall on my shoulders, and I am no longer able to think only about stories, plots, and characters like before.
Now I need to consider various problems with my children, wife, and parents. None of them are big problems. Most of them are trivial matters, but trivial matters are particularly energy-consuming. Such trivial matters also make it difficult for me to fully immerse myself in my novels. .
Take as an example the day I announced the third update.
It was Saturday, and my wife and I took our child out early in the morning to participate in a Lego robot programming competition.
He was participating in the competition, while I was seizing the time to code in the cafe upstairs.
The game ended an hour later, and I packed up my things and went to join them for lunch.
After eating out, I drove home around 1:30. After a short rest, my wife took the kids to help with homework, and I took the time to code.
At half past two o'clock, he packed up and went out again, taking his children to attend the karate teaching ceremony - he had been practicing this. At first, he hoped that he could exercise, but now it has become a habit.
During the ribbon giving ceremony, I found a table and chairs outside a bakery and sat down to continue typing.
Next to it was the ribbon-giving ceremony, with music and shouts from the host, and I was coding under the bright sun more than ten meters away.
It didn’t take long to write, probably less than half an hour. My son was about to go on stage to tie the knot, so I packed my things again, put on my bag and went to take pictures with him.
Then I changed places and found a cafe to have dinner.
This is the longest period of time that I can type continuously during the day, from four o'clock in the afternoon to eight o'clock in the evening - after dinner.
It was after dinner in a cafe that I read everyone's petition for this chapter and book review, and agreed to break out.
At eight o'clock, I packed up and left again, picking up my son at the place where he learned to play football - it was just above the cafe, so I didn't have to change places, otherwise I would have to find another place in the middle.
After receiving the child, I drove the child and my wife home, let the child wash, and I turned on the computer and continued coding.
I kept writing until 1:30 in the morning to finish writing the update for the day.
It is really difficult for me to be immersed in a book when I am always interrupted, always have to change places, always have to pack up and leave, and then find a place to sit down and write. I have to find the state again every time. I finally get there, but I get interrupted after writing for a while...
And days like this are almost the norm during this summer vacation.
I'm not complaining to you, I just want you to know what the daily life of a full-time online novel writer is like.
Seven years ago, when I wrote "The Winner Takes All", I didn't have any children, I had just been married, and I was still living with my parents. I wake up every day and start writing after breakfast. I continue writing until lunch, continue writing after lunch, continue writing until dinner in the evening, continue writing after dinner, and continue writing until I go to bed.
During this period, except for eating and going to the bathroom, nothing could disturb me. I was still young, energetic and extremely lively at that time.
As for the day I just described, have you noticed that I have absolutely no time to spend with my wife? Even when I go to bed, I usually go to bed after she falls asleep.
Before, my wife stayed with me to get through it, but later she found out that she couldn't get through it with me... and had to retreat.
Sometimes she and I hardly chat a few words a day except for necessary exchanges.
She is actually waiting to talk and chat with me every night when she goes to bed. But I'm sorry, most of the time I can't even satisfy her request - unless I talk about books with her. Well, although my wife doesn’t watch football or read the books I wrote, I still talk to her when I’m stuck, and she also helps me with a lot of good ideas.
If at the end of the day I can go to bed before one o'clock in the morning, I've gone to bed early.
In addition to the trivial things in life that affect my coding speed, and besides the fact that my body affects my coding speed, the book itself also makes it difficult for me to speed up.
Let me report to you how I write a book in a day under normal circumstances.
In addition to the kind of running around and writing every opportunity I just mentioned.
After I get up every morning, I will go over everything I wrote the day before. On the one hand, I will check for typos, and on the other hand, I will revise and revise it. If I have better ideas, I will overturn and rewrite some parts. Why not check and make changes immediately after writing?
This is to allow me to withdraw from the emotions and mentality that I had when I wrote the content the day before, and to examine what I wrote yesterday from a different perspective, and maybe I will make new discoveries.
Maybe something I was stuck on yesterday that made me want to die, suddenly figured it out today.
Because I went to bed late, I got up late. After finishing the changes, it was almost eleven o'clock, and it was only at this time that the new content started.
If you are in good condition, you can finish one chapter before dinner. If you are in bad condition, you can finish one chapter before ten o'clock in the evening.
I'm in a bad state. It's very likely that I worked hard to write it today. I lay in bed thinking about it over and over again at night, and I will invalidate and rewrite it when I wake up the next day.
This is also the reason why I must have manuscripts saved - I am not the kind of author who is extremely talented and can write books in one go. I would often get stuck, encounter bottlenecks, and find that several chapters I had written before were invalid...
If you don't save the manuscript, you can only stop updating it.
Some readers said that I update twice every day, one chapter in the morning and one in the afternoon. There is no passion and no hope at all.
But this is the state that I try my best to maintain.
When this book has the least number of manuscripts saved, after setting two chapters to automatically update the next day, only one chapter is saved.
From having only one chapter in the archive to being able to give you three consecutive updates in the past two days, I spent a month slowly accumulating the archive.
Some readers said that you write slowly and poorly.
Speaking of "water", I think it may be that our understanding of "water" is different.
For some readers, if you don’t write about football matches and the protagonist scoring goals, it’s just water.
But for me, writing only about the game and only about the protagonist scoring goals is watery.
Game after game, follow the schedule of the five major European leagues. The protagonist scores a goal in each game, and collects various championships and personal honors season after season...
It's easy to write this kind of content, but I don't like writing it.
This is not a football novel, this is a football guide.
I completely ignored "Fox in the Zone". Why do I still write it according to the rhythm of real football? Why can't I write about the stories and characters' fates that revolve around football?
Looks off the field are just as important as things that have nothing to do with football.
Because they, along with the game itself, shape each character.
As long as there are games, Hu Lai is just a scoring machine. He has no way to come and no way to go. From the beginning, he just wanted to join the school team to now he just wants to win a championship. How did he change step by step in the middle? It cannot be reflected through competition.
What is his living environment, what are the personalities of his parents, how do such parents and living environment shape him, who are the people around him, people who like him, people who hate him...all of this can be combined to shape him. Come out with a complete Hu Lai.
Otherwise, what everyone sees is just a "paper figure". It looks like a person from the front, but when you go around it, it's just cardboard from the back.
Hu Lai is like this, Li Qingqing is like this, Li Ziqiang, Xie Lan, Hu Lixin, Zhao Kangming, Wang Guangwei, Zhang Qinghuan, Chen Xingyi...etc., many people who appear in my book are like this.
Of course, due to space issues, characters who are not very important will have fewer scenes, and there will be less descriptions of their surroundings.
But the point is that no one is isolated and only exists in the plot of a football match.
Without those descriptions outside of football, without those descriptions that some readers think of as "water", this character will not stand up, it will be meaningless, and it will be just a symbol.
For example, if there were no previous plots that started when he entered the Olympic training team, how could Hu Lai's hat trick against the South Korean team in the end have enough explosive effect? Can I just mention the football feud between China and South Korea before the game?
I said at the end of the first volume that even when my grades were particularly poor, I insisted on writing the campus football plot in my mind word for word according to my original ideas.
Well, I still say this now. No matter how many people don’t like the plots outside the stadium, I will still insist on writing, writing them completely, and writing them fully, because every word in these plots is how I built this world. The cornerstone is the clouds and wind in the sky of this world, the fish in the water, the soil, the green plants, the bougainvillea blooming on the balcony, and the sunset in the group photo...
Without these, the world is incomplete and unconvincing.
Without these, it would be meaningless for me to write this story. So I might as well extract the central idea to you in one sentence, and then declare the book to be finished.
I didn't write this book... or I just wanted to write about how Hu Lai conquered the world of football in the imaginary world.
I also want to put my personal thoughts on football, life, family, children, dreams, love... and many things over the years in a book and a world.
When I read a book I like, I feel like I am immersed in the world created by the author and cannot extricate myself. After finishing the book, I will feel a strong sense of melancholy and emptiness in my heart.
I felt this way after watching "The Overthrow of the Han" for several days in a row.
I wrote my fantasy football novel with the idea of "I want to create a world".
So even though some of the plot may seem unnecessary to some readers, I still want to write it because I know it is necessary.
I have my own persistence and stubbornness in this regard.
And are there much plots written outside of these games? I don’t think it’s too much. It’s not a word that is necessary to write.
Just say that from the end of the Chinese League One last season to the current war between China and South Korea, some readers have counted and said that there have been no games in many chapters.
But I don’t write books based on how many chapters there must be competitions. I arrange the content according to character creation and plot advancement.
From Chapter 66 to Chapter 103, there are only two insignificant games in nearly forty chapters. One is the last round of the Chinese League, a ceremonial game, and the other is a warm-up match for the training team. .
These two games can basically be regarded as no games.
So what did I write outside of these two games?
Hu Lai returns home, eases the relationship with his parents, tries to reunite with Coach Li, and gradually interacts and develops feelings with Li Qingqing; the new contract with the club is finalized; the reconciliation between Hu Lai's mother and grandfather; a brief introduction by taking advantage of the World Cup An overview of world football ;Use a game similar to FM Football Manager to visualize Hu Lai's abilities, and also pave the way for future plots, and the football game itself is also necessary to shape the world; Attention from the national team; Chen Xingyi and Luo Kai's respective exes The intersection of destiny and Hu Lai; the National Olympic training is equivalent to opening a new dungeon, with new teammates and new characters appearing one after another, taking advantage of the training opportunity to continue development with Li Qingqing; describing Hu Lai's current abilities through Guo Junfu's perspective; a party It reflects Hu Lai's ability and shows it again. The easter eggs and tacit understanding of his relationship with Li Qingqing; describe the grudges and resentments between Chinese football and Korean football in this time and space through the East Asian Cup, and bring out the two main opponents in this age group in the future... Finally, there is the China-South Korea war. A blockbuster was born.
With so much content, I simply summarized it in a few hundred words. It seems that the content in the previous dozens of chapters is indeed quite good.
But can we really understand the world and characters in this novel by just reading these summaries?
Or if I write it another way, about Hu Lai’s date with Li Qingqing when he went home, I will mention a paragraph in the text: “Hu Lai and Li Qingqing made an appointment to meet and had a meal. After the meal, they went shopping and talked about each other. ideal, Hu Lai felt a little melancholy and lost, because Li Qingqing is going to play in the World Cup, but he doesn't even know where the World Cup door opens... After returning home, Hu Lai received a call from Uncle Yong, telling him that the contract was negotiated, so he said goodbye to his parents and returned to the club... …”
Is this a novel?
Maybe, but it's not the novel I wanted to write.
The novel I want to write may be a bit cumbersome, taking the trouble to describe things other than the protagonist. From the perspective of serialization, it may be watery and slow-paced.
But when I wrote it, I considered what effect the book would have as a whole when it was finished.
I hope that when the time comes, everyone will be willing to read it again and more times. At that time, you will read more things in one sitting.
Of course, I also understand readers’ opinions and dissatisfaction with this. For example, some people say that if it can explode, everything will be okay.
I agree with this statement 100%.
But the problem is that I can't write this book with quality and quantity. Let's not talk about whether I can update it ten or five times a day. Even if I am asked to update it three times a day, it will be difficult for me to do it.
I just say that in order to ensure my current quality, I cannot increase the speed. This is a fact.
Quality and quantity are often a helpless paradox.
Of course I also hope that I can update three or four times a day and ensure that the quality does not decline.
It's just that "I can't do it"!
Occasionally, I mean occasionally, we can have an explosion like this time when we encounter an important competition and the archives allow it. For me now, it is considered very good...
That's basically it. Because I write wherever I think, it looks a bit trivial and messy.
After all, this is a single chapter written to casually chat with everyone, which is different from writing the main text of a novel. I don’t have to carefully arrange the plot of the story, and I don’t have to think about which paragraph is better to put at the front and which paragraph is better at the end. I don’t even have to fix typos...
These nearly 5,000 words were written before I went to bed after I finished writing the main text for the day. Even so, when I wrote this, it was already 1:40 in the morning on August 25th.
My wife had already fallen asleep. Before going to bed, I hugged her and apologized to her. After all, it was technically the Chinese Valentine's Day...
My main purpose in writing this single chapter is to hope that we can all understand each other.
When you see that the plot is not moving at the speed you expected, please don't rush to criticize. If chasing is more difficult, you can turn on automatic subscription to support it first, every week or month.
All I can promise is to write this book to the best of my ability, and hope that the quality will not decline by the time it is finished.
I will create this world according to my plan and rhythm. Everyone must have confidence in me. I will write slowly and you will read slowly. I don’t plan a word count in advance, nor do I set a length.
It’s over when it’s time to finish. It doesn’t matter if it’s three million words or seven million words.
Now I have written more than one million words and haven’t left the country yet. I don’t care about this kind of thing at all, because the story goes very smoothly, Hu Lai is growing up, his football career has just started, and his future life is still very long.
The road is at your feet, just walk, no matter how long it is?
When we reach the end, we look back and realize that this journey has its ups and downs, as well as magnificent legendary stories, and even the ordinary life of wild flowers on the roadside.
This is Hu Lai’s story and the world he lives in.
By then, I hope that when you and I leave this world, we will be a little melancholy, a little empty, and a little satisfied.
Thanks.
Finally, I would like to send you a picture of the starry sky that I took at two o'clock in the middle of the night by the window of my study room after I finished writing a single chapter yesterday.
Although I didn't get the Milky Way I wanted to take, I'm 100% sure that the place with the densest stars must be the Milky Way. (End of chapter)