Chapter 151

Chapter 151

Dear readers, hello!

First, I want to thank you for making it through the previous 300,000 words to get here.

Through these words, we’ve immersed ourselves in the same story together. Now we share a common language.

Here are a few things I’d like to say:

I am the author of this novel, and “Huahua Xiao Saozi” is my pen name.

A character named “Huahua” has also appeared in the story before, but I named her that to add a bit of fun and interaction. That “Huahua” is not me.

I am timid as a mouse.

My favorite horror novelist, and the one I admire most, Mr. Zhou Dedong, once said that timid people are best suited to writing horror stories.

I guess the reason he said that is probably because timid people are the best at noticing all the places in life where terrifying things might happen.

Because you’re timid, you imagine things. Because you imagine things, you become afraid.

Now I’ve taken the world of a coward and shared it in words, and that’s how this suspenseful, mildly scary novel came to be.

While writing this novel, many enthusiastic readers interacted with me in the comments section.

I’ve gathered some of the most common questions, and I’ll answer them all here:

Question One:

“Is this the author’s first time writing a novel?”

Answer:

Yes. I swear this is my first time writing a novel. To be honest, even I didn’t expect my first novel to be something scary instead of a romance.

At the time, a beautiful and talented friend of mine was writing a wish-fulfillment story on this app about dating a male celebrity. I thought it was new and fun, so I opened an account too.

I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write. I just thought it looked fun, and I wanted to play around with it.

I started writing in February of this year, and at the beginning, I didn’t have an outline. Coming up with a complete story from the start was very difficult for me, so all I could do was think of a little and write a little, following the ideas wherever they went.

This toothpaste-squeezing style of writing actually suited me quite well. Sometimes, as I wrote, new ideas would suddenly burst out, and step by step, I somehow ended up writing 300,000 words. Originally, I planned to stop at 80,000 words. I never imagined that a tiny rookie like me would have anyone reading my work at all.

Question Two:

“Dear author, why do you update so slowly?”

Answer:

This is the question I’ve received the most.

My family, my friends, my good people, I’m not going to lie. Every time I get a comment like this, I am overwhelmed with shame.

At first, only six people were reading this novel, and they were six friends of mine scattered all over the country.

Later, more readers gradually came along, and my keyboard was entrusted with everyone’s hopes for new updates.

I am a huge lazybones, and writing for me is like squeezing out toothpaste. Having to post two chapters a day on a regular schedule makes me suffer terribly. Fishing for three days and drying the nets for two, on the other hand, somehow gives me inspiration.

I know this process has been frustrating for you, so here, I want to say: I’m sorry.

Oh, and also! There’s another major obstacle slowing down my updates – my boss.

Just talking about this makes me mad.

My boss is a middle-aged man, nearly fifty. He’s tall and fat, about 185 centimeters, with so little hair left on his bald head you can practically count the strands. Perched on his nose is a pair of round glasses as thick as the bottoms of beer bottles.

Every day, he comes by my office three times – once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once more if we’re working overtime at night.

Every time he sees me, he smiles, his double chin squeezing itself into a triple chin, and asks:

“Oh? Busy, are we?”

Isn’t that a ridiculous thing to say? I mean, seriously. I’m practically glued to my workstation. Do I look like I’m sitting around doing nothing?

I always feel like this is a kind of harassment.

But I only curse him in my head. My hands, meanwhile, switch windows faster than anyone’s. Before he even makes it around to my side of the screen, my page has already gone from the Word document where I’m writing my novel to a work website.

At this point, he uses his warm, broad, and rather sweaty grabby hand to pat me on the shoulder:

“Not bad. Keep it up.”

I genuinely want to gag. I always feel like he’s being passive-aggressive, giving me this vibe of, “I know you’re writing a novel, but I’m just not going to call you out on it. I’m just going to smile and watch you. You know what you’re doing, right?”

I don’t like this boss. The first reason is that every day, he harasses me exactly like I described above, seriously affecting my novel-writing progress. He scares all my inspiration away.
The second reason is that his taste is genuinely awful.

It’s like he never goes online and never watches dramas.

Can’t he open those dung-beetle eyes of his from behind his bottle-bottom glasses and take a look at the world? Look at what people wear in workplace dramas: black suits, black trousers, white shirts, black leather shoes… How good does that look?

And the uniforms he had custom-made for us – guess what colors they were? Blue and white.

If you say he has no taste, well, he somehow picked such romantic colors. But if you say he does have taste, those two colors ended up on our work uniforms.

But my opinion doesn’t matter. I’m not the one paying everyone’s salary, after all. He can do whatever he wants. Let him.

Question Three:

“A lot of the details the author wrote feel very realistic. Are they based on real experiences?”

Answer:

How is that possible! How is that possible! How is that possible! Important things must be asked three times!

Let me put it this way: if my life were as “exciting and busy” as Qin Song and Huang Yuanrui’s – having to juggle and soothe three different people of the opposite sex on an average day – I would not have time to write novels. (covers face and cries)

And some readers asked whether the ending was so rushed because I had started dating someone – I did not, I did not, I did not. (Da Shachun covers face)

I really didn’t… Haha, I didn’t even think the ending was rushed.

The story was finished, so naturally, it ended.

Question Four:

“Did the author really study psychology?”

Answer:

I have not studied psychology. Some of the details feel real because I put myself in the characters’ shoes, closed my eyes, and seriously thought about what I would feel and how I would react if I were the person in that situation.

People say it takes two hours to write and two minutes to read. For me, the hardest part actually isn’t typing or plotting. It’s feeling the characters’ emotions in my own mind.

During the days when I was writing about Zhang Qiong hearing knocks at the door, I was often so scared I didn’t dare go home, so I stayed in the company dormitory.

Later, when I finally dared to go home, I still had to clench my stiff, pointed keys in my hand whenever I walked at night. When I slept, I had to leave the lights on.

The slightest sound outside my door would make my eyes fly open in fright, and I’d grab my little blanket in terror.

During that time, it felt like all the yang energy in my body had been drained away. I was practically writing this novel with my life. I even doubted myself back then – if this kept going, would I scare myself so badly I’d stop updating?

As it turned out, I held on. I did it. I made it through the scariest period and safely wrote my way to the ending!

Question Five:

“How does the author understand men so well?”

Answer:

I… Hahaha, now this is a slightly awkward question!

Take many of the descriptions of men’s inner thoughts in the story, for example. There were plenty of places where you all cried, “That’s so typical,” and “That’s so male,” but I can’t really explain in detail why I “understand” them so well.

Is it because I started dating early? Maybe. Let me tell you a secret that isn’t much of a secret – I started puppy love back in middle school.

Qin Song and Sun Xiaoke’s relationship was drawn from my own early romance. Maybe that’s why I figured things out early, though honestly, having that particular lightbulb go on doesn’t mean much… (covers face)

The character Song itself is also connected to that early romance of mine. When I was naming the male lead for the novel, it came to mind very naturally.

So that’s roughly the situation with the five questions above. Consider that an opening statement.

Now comes what I truly wanted to share with you.

I want to tell you: whatever you do, don’t learn from me.

Don’t casually start writing a horror novel, even if it’s only mildly scary, even if it’s only suspense.

You may think writing a novel is something incredibly ordinary – just a side hustle, tapping away at a keyboard in your free time, posting it online, and then sitting back to wait for the rave reviews to roll in…

No. It really isn’t.

From the moment you create it and post it online, the scales of your life begin to tilt ever so slightly.

Tens of thousands of people are reading this novel. It’s my debut work. My expectations aren’t high. As long as it doesn’t flop, as long as someone reads it, then it has, in its own small way, made something of me.

But I also feel that it is, little by little, little by little…

Trying to destroy me.