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 like "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 this.
Some people say that I am not short of money, so my speed has dropped.
Really not, who would complain about having too much money?
As long as I can increase my speed and update it three or five times a day, what will the results of my book be like this?
But I really can’t write fast enough.
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, the reason is that as I grow older, more family responsibilities fall on my shoulders, which prevents me from thinking about stories, plots and characters as 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 myself.
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 meet 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 participate in the karate instruction 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 code 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 came across everyone's petition for this chapter and book review, and I promised everyone 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, get 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 into it, 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 author is like.
Seven years ago, when I wrote "The Winner Takes the King", I had no children, I had just gotten married, and I was still living with my parents. I woke up every day and started writing after breakfast, and continued writing until lunch.
, continue writing after lunch, continue writing until dinner in the evening, continue writing after dinner, and continue writing until 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, but later she found out that she couldn't survive me... and had to retreat.
Sometimes, apart from necessary exchanges, she and I hardly chat a few words a day.
She is actually looking forward to talking and chatting with me every night when she goes to bed. But I'm sorry, most of the time I can't even meet her request - unless I talk about books with her. Well, although my wife doesn't watch football
, doesn’t read the books I wrote, but 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, then I go 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 at every opportunity as mentioned just now.
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 modify it. If I have a better idea, I will overturn and rewrite some parts. Why not write
What about checking for changes immediately after finishing?
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 your condition is good, you can finish one chapter before dinner. If your condition is bad, you can finish one chapter before ten o'clock in the evening.
I'm not in a good state. It's possible that I worked hard to write it today, and I lay in bed thinking about it over and over again at night, and when I woke up the next day, I would invalidate it and rewrite it.
This is also the reason why I must save manuscripts - I am not the kind of author who is extremely talented and writes books in one go. I often get stuck, encounter bottlenecks, and find that several chapters I have written before are 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 was least saved, after setting two chapters to automatically update the next day, only one chapter was 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 also 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 the protagonist’s goals is just water.
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 football, this is football strategy.
"" I have completely ignored it. Why do I still write according to the rhythm of real football? Why can't I write about the stories and the fate of the characters 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 goal-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 did such parents and living environment shape him, who are the people around him, the people who like him, the people who hate him... Everything can be combined to shape him.
Come up 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 look around, it's just cardboard from the back.
Hu Lai is like this, so is Li Qingqing, 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, will be meaningless, and will be just a symbol.
For example, if there weren't those 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 say something about China and South Korea's football grievances 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. When I finish the book, I will have a strong sense of melancholy and an emptiness in my heart.
I felt this way after watching "The Overthrow of Han" for several days in a row.
I wrote my fantasy football book with the idea of "I want to create a world".
So even though some plots may seem unnecessary to some readers, I still want to write them because I know they are necessary.
I have my own persistence and stubbornness in this regard.
And do you write much about the plot outside of these competitions? I don’t think there is much. What is necessary to write is not one word too many.
Just say that from the end of the Chinese League One last season to the current China-South Korea war, some readers have counted and said that there have been no games in many chapters.
But when I write a book, I don’t write it based on how many chapters there must be a competition. I arrange the content based on 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.
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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; using a game similar to FM Football Manager to visualize Hu Lai's abilities, and also paving the way for future plots, and the football game itself is also necessary to shape the world; from China
The attention of the big-name teams; the intersection of Chen Xingyi and Luo Kai's futures with 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 opportunity of training to continue development with Li Qingqing; through Guo Junfu
Describe Hu Lai's current abilities from a perspective; a party not only reflects Hu Lai's abilities but also shows the easter eggs and tacit understanding of his relationship with Li Qingqing; describe the grudges and grudges 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... In the end, a blockbuster in the China-South Korea war turned out.
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 by just looking at these summaries, can we really understand the world and characters in it?
Or if I write it another way, when Hu Lai goes home and has a date with Li Qingqing, 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.
Hu Lai was a little melancholy and disappointed because Li Qingqing was going to play in the World Cup, but he didn't even know where the World Cup door opened... 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 it?
Maybe, but it's not what I wanted to write.
What 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. By then, if you read it in one go, you will read more.
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 ten or five times a day. Even if I am asked to update three times a day, it will be difficult for me to do it.
I just said that in order to ensure my current quality, I cannot increase the speed. This is true.
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 for casual chatting with everyone, which is different from writing a main text. 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 in the front and which paragraph is better to put in the back. I Didn't even bother to fix the typos...
These nearly 5,000 words were written after I finished writing the main text for the day, and I took the time to write before going to bed - even so, when I wrote this, it was already 1:40 in the morning on August 25th.
My wife was already 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 chapter is to hope that we can all understand each other.
When you see that the plot is not advancing at the speed you expected, please don't rush to criticize. If it's more difficult to follow, you can turn on the automatic subscription to support it for a week or a 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 do not pre-plan the number of words or set the length.
It’s over when it’s time to finish, whether it’s three million words or seven million words, it doesn’t matter.
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 on, no matter how long the road is?
When we reach the end, we look back and realize that the journey has been rugged and bumpy, as well as magnificent and legendary stories, as well as 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.