Becoming a Saint by Leisure Reading - Chapter 1007

I’ll take my leave now, and see you on the next journey

Even the most incomplete chapter will eventually have its last sentence.

695 days, 4.2 million words, today, “I Became a Saint Through Leisure Books” was completed.

This is my first time writing an online article. For me, it was a wonderful journey. I saw magnificent scenery and had lovely companions. I am very grateful and satisfied during this time.

Now, although I am reluctant, it is time to put the final period.

Next, we will move on to the thank-you speech session.

Let me first talk about the end of the story.

The ending was rushed and a bit sloppy. Some friends said it had a bad ending, and some said the story structure was too big, the writing was not strong enough, and they couldn’t control it.

In fact, last month, Ba Wan was struggling with the question of how long should he write?

Friends who have read the story know that, given the background of the 80,000-word design, if you really want to expand on it, it wouldn’t be a problem to write another one or two million words.

Let alone other things, the 80,000 words are used to wrap up the content of “Journey to the West”, write about all the ancient sages of the human race, and let all the familiar mythological characters appear one by one, the Golden Immortal Realm has 800,000 words, the Creation Realm has another 800,000 words, and the finale of canonization has 300,000 words. It is simply easy and comfortable, and has nothing to do with writing skills.

And from the perspective of income, although this book cannot be copyrighted, but with the current performance, even if I lag behind in updates, it will be no problem to make at least six figures a month.

Two million words, I can definitely spend another ten months writing.

However, Ba Wan finally rejected this idea.

The reason is very simple. If written in this way, the existence of “idle books” becomes meaningless, and the story becomes a normal prehistoric story.

In Ba Wan’s opinion, that was the real collapse.

Rather than being criticized by everyone later, it is better to say goodbye in a decent manner.

Therefore, the tone I set for the finale is to fill in all the holes that should be filled in the previous parts, make the overall background and timeline clear, maintain the characters and logic, and then end it as soon as possible.

In addition, there is another important reason, that is, Ba Wan is indeed a little tired.

From the beginning, I didn’t prepare for this book. I didn’t have an outline or a design. I just opened Word and started working. I didn’t think it would be as good as it is now, and I didn’t think I would write such a long book. After all, the original idea was just to kill the time freed up by the epidemic.

I knew the setting of Wanli Tongtianlu about three hours earlier than you did. I got the character setting of Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove almost at the same time as you did. I had no idea what the news that changed the direction of the story was until that chapter came out…

Do you think my problem is that I don’t have any saved manuscripts?

No, my problem is that I have to face a blank document every day, thinking about the bad chapter yesterday and how to continue!
Other authors say that daily updates are like looking at a room full of ingredients and thinking about what to cook today; Ba Wan says that daily updates are like looking at the clean balance and thinking about where to earn some money to buy groceries first, and then cook.

Fortunately, I have a deep (shameless) bottom (and) I have written the story step by step to the present…

(By the way, I don’t recommend doing this, because it’s really bad.)
So, before the 3 million words, Ba Wan could still update from time to time, but when it was around 3.5 million words, especially after I started writing The Investiture of the Gods, fatigue broke out. Sometimes, Ba Wan sat in front of the computer for three or four hours and just didn’t want to use his brain.

In fact, I have always felt guilty.

Therefore, for the next book, I must prepare well, including the outline, character design, main plot, and manuscripts!
By then, I will completely take off the hat of being a disgrace to writers!

Having discussed the questions at the end, let’s review this book again.

If I were to give this first book a score, I think it would be around 60 or 70 points.

It’s not Versailles, but because of insufficient preparation, there are indeed many regrets in the book, and many expressions are not excellent. This is my lesson and also the experience of my next book.

The plot of this book has undergone several major adjustments.

At the beginning, Ba Wan wanted to write this story using the ideas of historical text, with a total of 700,000 to 800,000 words, which is roughly equivalent to the length of 45 episodes.

Therefore, there is the plot of Chen Luo entering the court, which involves the death of the crown prince, the dispute over the succession, the resentment of the queen, the division of the four ministers, and the elements of the prince of Jing. (By the way, the ending of the queen is mentioned in the book. She learned the truth and went to her ancestral land to retire.)

It was during that period that the average subscription of this book skyrocketed to 10,000, and Ba Wan’s play was postponed again due to the epidemic, so Ba Wan overturned his original idea for the first time and decided to change to a fantasy idea.

However, the previous layout was almost ruined. If Chen Luo stayed in the capital, the main background could only be the court struggle. Therefore, Ba Wan designed the massacre outside the city, which has been criticized to this day, to bring out the Bamboo Forest forces, transfer Chen Luo from the capital to Dongcang, and replace the main background with the struggle between humans and barbarians.

The second major adjustment occurred when Chen Luo traveled around the world.

When writing this plot, the editor-in-chief and I had a long talk. In short, it can be summed up in one sentence: Travel plots are not easy to write. Even strong writers like XXXX and XXXXX had a hard time following the travel plot.

But as an author, I always feel that I am the lucky one. In my opinion, I want to show the great mysterious style and depict the human nature through the protagonist’s travels around the world, which is just right for “The Legend of the Eight Immortals” to focus on the worldly affairs, and in the middle, the assassination of Yujia is combined to complete the story of the whole volume. The setting of the 72 academies is also for this purpose.

but……

The follow-up reading really collapsed!

So, the second senior sister stepped in and slapped Chen Luo three times, sending him to the Southern Wilderness.

Sure enough, once “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio” was published, the desire to read it returned.

The third major adjustment is the part about blood tide.

The plot was not adjusted here, but Ba Wan began to adjust the writing style in this part, tending to use simpler text expressions, increasing the “meme” component, and making the style more relaxed, including more frequent use of emoticons.

Of course, there are pros and cons to doing this, and at one point some people suspected that the coach had been replaced.

In fact, the reason for the adjustment is, firstly, to make myself more happy when writing, and secondly, I am also looking for my own writing style. In fact, there have been some fine-tuning later, and I still need to continue learning and working hard.

There’s not much to say about the fourth major adjustment, it’s just the plot about the Gu Clan.

The plot of Gu Men had been framed a long time ago. But when it came to writing, it was a sensitive period, and the content was about external forces, court politics, and the medium of Gu poison…

Beware of malicious reporting.

So, Ba Wan was so cowardly that he changed the entire plot.

Some of the adjustments mentioned above left me with regrets, while others allowed me to gain experience. Overall, the gains outweighed the losses.

Then, let me talk about the parts of this book that satisfied me.

First of all, of course, is the creation of some characters.

For example, several senior brothers and sisters in Zhulin, such as Sima Lie, the saint who “I witnessed it with my own eyes”, Emperor Xuanzhang, the “unique emperor through the ages”, the old and powerless Qinglong Emperor, and the Qilin King who wins people over with virtue… There are many other minor characters, like the “great scholar of five texts”, and the half-saint of the An family who can clearly distinguish between righteousness and personal feelings, and so on.

Among all these, what makes me happiest is that I have the opportunity to weave a warm ending for some people in history.

For example, Xin Qiji, the King of the North, I did not have him appear on the stage and be canonized. Instead, I had him stand on the northern defense line of the human race, “completing the king’s affairs in the world and winning fame during his lifetime and after his death.”

For example, Li Qingzhao, “born to be a hero”, was one of the four famous kings, and had a happy ending in her life.

For example, Li He, the King of the East, had not died young. Instead, he would have wandered on the sea, thinking every day about how to hook up a dragon horse to accompany him.

For example, King Wen Tianxiang of the South, how much I wish his real life was actually a dream.

And there is Song Ci. Including “Xi Yuanlu” in the textbooks is my greatest tribute to this pioneer of forensic medicine.

When writing about these characters, I looked up a lot of information to understand their life stories. Many times it was not me who wrote the story, but their stories gave me direction to continue writing.

In addition, I have also written about many famous people in history, some of whose names may be well-known to us, while others are not so famous. Here, I would like to thank the enthusiastic readers, who basically help me annotate them in the chapter reviews.

The more I learn about these sages, the more I feel that our nation has had a hard time and our ancestors were truly amazing.

In addition to character creation, I feel that I have done a good job in exploring Confucian and Taoist themes.

Although I didn’t have an outline and wrote it in a hurry, I took the Confucianism and Taoism from pure poetry, combined them with elements of novels and operas, and reconstructed the system of Wanlilu. I think I did a good job. For me, what I am most proud of is not writing Journey to the West and Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, but writing The Peony Pavilion and The Injustice of Dou E…

I feel like it has a tiny bit of value.

Also, there is something I have to brag about.

That is, before the college entrance examination last year, my content accurately guessed two college entrance examination questions. One was a discussion about basic moves, brilliant moves, and common moves on the chess board, which came from the bad chess player Yan Baichuan; the other was about the transfer and adaptation of poetry and prose, which came from a fragment of an expert’s evaluation of Chen Luo’s poetry.

I learned from the feedback that I have helped two children. I don’t know whether they have been admitted to university, because they may have given up studying and I can’t contact them…

Now that I have summarized this book, I would like to talk about future plans and respond to the concerns of friends in the group.

The next book is already being conceived. Originally, I was going to write a book about urban entertainment… But after communicating with the editor-in-chief, I found that what Ba Wan wanted to write would be just dancing on the red line, and the risk of 404 was extremely high, so I decided to continue the ancient costume fantasy (Xianxia) theme for the next book.

Let me take a break for a while, then I will carefully prepare the outline, character settings, drafts, etc., and then I will release it, probably in the second half of the year.

Oh, I want to put an advertisement here.

A group of 80,000 alliance leaders!

The leader group is a WeChat group. You can join any reader group of this book and find the administrator Lao Wu to verify your entry into the group.

The benefits of the alliance leader group include but are not limited to: some peripheral gifts of books, offline gatherings, new book previews, etc.

If nothing unexpected happens, there will only be one leader group for 80,000 books in the future. In other words, if you are not a leader yet, don’t rush to become one. It’s not worth it. When the next book comes out, pay attention to the official discount activities, or the 80,000’s leader cashback activities, and then you can participate again.

Finally, comes the real part of the speech.

grateful.

First of all, I would like to thank my editorial team.

Thanks to Miss Bacon, who has fair skin, beautiful looks and long legs, for clicking on my manuscript on the subway at 7:30 in the morning on May 24, 2021, and then sending me an invitation to sign a contract; thank her for her support and encouragement along the way.

I would like to thank the editor-in-chief of Group 2, Beihe, for always maintaining an extremely professional attitude in the creation and providing me with many suggestions that have benefited me a lot.

Secondly, I would like to thank my operations team.

Thanks to Lao Wu, thanks to “The Miserable Goddess of Luo River”, thanks to Chenchen, thanks to “Liang Yi Han Guang”, thanks to “Ru Yao Lian Lian”, and thank you for helping me take care of the surrounding matters of this book, so that I can write with peace of mind, thank you very much.

Finally, of course, I would like to thank my dear readers.

Along the way, some people left and some came. Some people made witty comments, some people supported silently without saying a word; some people laughed and scolded the shame of the writers, some people were disappointed that they were not as good as the original and said that they were short; some people spent a lot of money, and some people came here for pirated copies and stayed here for a long time…

Although Ba Wan was in a small study, he could feel the hustle and bustle.

For the first time, I felt that communication through words was so vivid.

Thanks.

Thank you for coming to listen to my story.

……………………

A story is a journey. I am honored to take you on this journey of words.

The mountains remain green and the waters flow forever.

See you on our next journey!

I had planned to write my closing remarks tomorrow, but I’m feeling overwhelmed right now.

My heart is burning, my heart is burning, I can’t stop it…

(End of this chapter)