Chapter 333: February Bonus Chapter Status, Rambling Reflections

February Bonus Chapter Status, Rambling Reflections

February Bonus Chapter Status, Rambling Reflections

I was originally going to wait a few more days before posting the bonus chapter progress, but there's a single chapter I want to post, and posting a single chapter every day is a bit annoying, so I combined them into one post.

【Bonus Chapter Progress】(111/338) As of 25.01.25

Overall bonus chapter progress rose from 27.2% (89/327) on January 31st to 32.8% (111/338)

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【Vote-Debt Bonus Chapters】2,000 votes (02.28)

For every full 1,000 votes, add one bonus chapter.

Total bonus chapters added: 2.

【Tipping-Debt Bonus Chapters】

Total (40,278/100,000), each full Alliance Chief adds 3 bonus chapters. (25.02.25)

Total bonus chapters added: 0.

【Average Subscription Bonus Chapters】: 4,800 (02.25)

Starting from the initial 5,000 average subscriptions at the beginning of the month, every additional 100 average subscriptions adds one bonus chapter.

Total bonus chapters added: 0. (-2 chapters?)

【Alliance Chief Bonus Chapters】

Each additional Alliance Chief adds 3 bonus chapters.

Total bonus chapters added: 0.

【Leave-of-Absence Bonus Chapters】:

Took leave without updating: add 2 bonus chapters, total 1 day.

Only updated 4,000 characters: add 1 bonus chapter, total 5 days.

Total bonus chapters added: 7.

Bonus chapters:

330 (January total) + 2 (vote bonus) + 0 (tipping accumulated) + 2 (1 day of leave) + 5 (5 days of only 4,000 characters) = 339 bonus chapters

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《Aba's Mental Self-Check Ramblings》

【※: The following passage is full of unstructured, unconscious self-talk; Aba is seriously suspected of playing the victim.】

Don't complain about why I'm not properly writing chapters but writing this weird stuff instead. Cut me some slack, this is a process that helps me think and sort things out. (I wouldn't even show this to just anyone!)

Recently my health has been getting worse and worse, my head feels more and more muddled. If I don't write it all out, I feel like I won't be able to think clearly at all…

Consider it a kind of self-check (self-rescue) procedure for Aba to stabilize a mental anchor. Some people like to ramble; Aba just likes to write his thoughts out.

Conclusion: This is Aba, whose SAN value is nearly depleted, attempting a self-rescue behavior to restore SAN value.

Everyone, read at your discretion~

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The book has been running for almost five months, it's reached one million characters, and the story has covered three volumes (actually four). Give yourselves a round of applause.

Clap clap.

There are some merits, and I've gained some fans, but there are also quite a few shortcomings.

It's time for some self-analysis, to find where the problems lie.

Re! Fleet!

I originally wanted to borrow the great power of AI to help me analyze, but unfortunately DeepSeek said the document I provided "may violate usage guidelines" (?), so I had to give up.

Once again, I must reiterate: Aba is a respectable person!

The stories I've written have always complied with national laws and regulations!

And after several days of insomnia and staying up late thinking, I've summarized some unconscious mistakes I've made, as well as mistakes that could have been salvaged.

First of all, since this book opened, my biggest problem has actually been — being impatient.

The story hasn't progressed that much, and the female lead hasn't been pursued that much, but I, the person typing the words, am really, really impatient.

This "impatience" is reflected in every aspect.

Anxiety over grades dropping instead of rising, frustration over always getting sick and being useless.

Eager to accelerate the plot after realizing the problem, cutting unnecessary side plots, spending all day frantically typing.

All kinds of pressure piling up, pressure accumulating near the breaking point, mental damage about to max out the bar.

Update times getting later and later, finally reaching a ghostly death-race against midnight…

I know clearly in my heart this hurts everyone following along and me too, but I still can't put down my phone in the early hours, unable to fall asleep.

Anxious and reluctant to stay up late, trying to enjoy a little more time that belongs to myself — it feels a bit like revenge bedtime procrastination.

Under this kind of pressure, I can't do a daily self-review after finishing my writing, sometimes I don't even have the energy to check for typos myself, let alone adjust, delete, or revise.

There's a fear that one more look and it'll explode.

Aba has unknowingly reached a dangerous stage where a breakdown at any moment wouldn't be surprising.

I've tried self-rescue a few times, trying to forget everything else, relying on updating enough to make the grades better and ease my own pressure.

I once thought I could withstand the pressure just by updating enough and secretly felt pleased — but actually, no.

And writing that doesn't meet the standard of quality is irresponsible to everyone.

I'm sorry to the readers who believed in me, for letting them down.

I'm also sorry to my own late nights, the hair I've lost, my receding hairline, and my increasingly painful hemorrhoids… sigh.

I'm also sorry to the characters I created.

A lot of the groundwork was missing, character arcs were weakened, and many characters were used by me in a clumsy deus ex machina fashion — used up and then tossed aside — which is a low-level mistake I really shouldn't have made.

I know my biggest pressure comes from the numbers.

But on the other hand, honestly, I really can't manage to completely ignore the numbers with a calm heart.

It's just too hard.

Everyone knows my situation right now — the pressure is considerable, and I still have to rely on this book's income to live, so in the short term I can't achieve a heart like still water.

I'm trying to find a solution.

For quite a long stretch — even now — I'm still stuck in a vicious cycle of self-doubt.

Shameful to say, during this period, especially the past week, I've really wanted to find a chance to have a good cry.

Although I don't think crying means weakness, I've never been someone who cries easily; the number of times I've cried from childhood till now can be counted on one hand.

But maybe I need a chance to vent, to pour out the anxiety inside…

It's just that I never found material to cry over. Last time I had this idea — to cry when Nezha's Lady Yin died — but my mom was right beside me, so in the end I held it back.

What touched me recently was seeing posts about people buying food and goods that were near-expiry or even past their expiration date because of their various circumstances…

"There's nothing I can do about it in this life."

As someone equally unlucky and ill-fated, I felt something, but surprisingly not too much.

It's not that I can't empathize — it's that I empathize all too well with that feeling of helplessness.

I understand their difficulties, because I'm struggling too; I'm also one of those whose life started with a sky-collapse.

But, with some suspicion of being the type who talks tough without feeling the pain myself, I really hope they don't give up completely.

Walk forward, walk upward, walk toward the sunlight.

And while silently hoping they can be brave, I've also gained a little courage to keep facing the bleak reality.

Analysis session over — back to the book's problems.

The opening of the last volume wasn't written as well as it could have been; it was a bit slow, and some side plots were opened, but none that readers were particularly interested in.

Then I cut and trimmed, touched on things lightly, and brushed past them in a single stroke before any big problems arose.

After picking up the pace, I was personally fairly satisfied with the final wrap-up; the quality of the writing should have recovered somewhat.

Overall, I shouldn't have let everyone down too much — I salvaged a bit of dignity at the end.

(Should be, right?)

In hindsight, the biggest problem with this book right now is actually that the focus is off.

Building faction bases can be written, going out on adventures can be written, but the primary and secondary got swapped.

They can be embellishments for this book, but they shouldn't be the focus that consumes huge amounts of space.

The focus is monster girls.

Monster girls! Monster girls! Freaking monster girls!

What should have consumed a great deal of ink is, and can only be, the monster girls being romanced.

What I need to do is make them not one-dimensional, give them each their own qualities that everyone can like.

I used to know this, but I don't know when my brain short-circuited and I actually forgot this most important point.

The next volume coming up will truly return to the path where getting close and cuddly with monster girls is the main focus, with adventures and other things as secondary.

I hope this path is the right one.

One that can rekindle the enthusiasm of everyone who's been stockpiling the book.

This time, I'm going to thoroughly revise the outline properly, and then stop casually cutting and changing things!!!

The constantly slipping numbers have given me a deep sense of unworthiness and crisis, making me feel that everything I have now is a bubble of illusion that could slip from my hands at any moment.

Honestly, for the past half month — even since just before the New Year — I've been completely lost.

Approaching the New Year, traffic across the whole site was dropping — that's normal, I understand.

I thought things would get better after the New Year, but starting one day after the holiday, new subscriptions suddenly plummeted by a third.

Really without any warning, they dropped by a third all at once — it's extreme.

There had already been a downward trend before; what I was holding onto was already hard enough, and then that sudden slash that cut things in half nearly sent me straight to the other side…

I really was just a hair away from being sent straight to the ICU, and then my reputation would have been ruined for good.

So hard, really so hard.

Especially since, at that point in time, I had been sick while also pushing myself to update eight thousand words a day for a whole week.

It just felt like the effort wasn't being rewarded.

That feeling — it's truly helpless.

The sky has fallen!

A little bit of a breakdown.

But for the first time I didn't get knocked down — I chose to keep mustering my courage, thinking it was because I wasn't updating enough.

So then I updated ten thousand words a day for another week.

All I can say is there was a slight improvement — but actually it was just back to the previous level, still unstable, going up and down.

And just when I thought once again that things were looking up, new subscriptions got beheaded again — the magnitude of the drop was exactly the same as before, still chopping right at the neck.

Ah, can't help but sigh.

Life is so full of hardship…

And this time, when I climbed back up again, I didn't force myself to write ten thousand words anymore, but instead tried to slow down my typing speed and write eight thousand words with guaranteed quality and quantity.

Before, I could bang out ten thousand characters in five to six hours; if I used the forbidden technique of voice input, the fastest I could finish was four and a half hours.

Now, eight thousand characters takes six to seven hours, and I still might not finish.

The time spent is roughly twice as slow as before, but the quality of the writing should have picked back up.

I can feel it myself — I know the writing from this past week has pretty much returned to the level it should be at.

I also noticed where the problems were in the earlier chapters, and I feel a bit ashamed.

Still, after I switched to this update pace, new subscriptions still didn't go up — still stuck in that torturous mid-plateau.

But the number of daily followers has recovered a little.

The follow-subscription numbers for new chapters haven't had any big swings, and have even ticked up slightly, but daily new subscriptions can't get back to where they were.

At that point, I started to calm down.

I tried, I did what I should… beyond my own problems, then what?

I should consider whether it's an issue with the platform's recommendation traffic.

I was about to hit a million characters back then — was it a traffic pool problem? I couldn't say.

But plainly, the biggest problem right now is probably that I'm not pulling in traffic.

My current daily new bookmarks are around a hundred and fifty or sixty; compared to the big shots who easily pull in several thousand bookmarks a day, the effect is obviously different.

No new readers means no steady stream of new subscriptions. (I need to trick more good brothers into joining)

1. Recommendations — I can't force this one. With both follow-reads and new subscriptions dropping now, all I can do is rely on stable, filling updates and pray that the editors and operations folks take pity on me.

2. The opening dozens of chapters — I can't make big revisions; personally I don't think the problem there is too big.

3. The title — I can't change this lightly either. Unless there's a stunningly brilliant new title, it might not actually be better than what I have now.

4. The synopsis… ah, right, the biggest weak link is that one. I'm afraid I really do need to revise it — it probably isn't attractive enough.

But the problem is — I! Really! Don't! Know how! To write a synopsis!

So, how about we all put our heads together.

Everyone, please lend me your strength!

Help, help me out!

I do want to come up with something classy, a short few lines that hook people, but I'm afraid I just don't have that talent…

I'm not holding out much hope, but how about you give it a try? Maybe I'll actually use it.

If some literary genius can stand out, get everyone's approval, and end up being adopted… I'll definitely give you a huge reward!

Please, Crazy Thursday on me!

(looks away)

It can be more than one day!

In short, everyone, please help me out!

……

Also, it's the end of the month — please, monthly tickets!!!

Please subscribe! Please auto-subscribe!

This really is very important to me!

……

The third recommendation I should have gotten is basically dead. Recent follow-reads are too few, daily sales are too few, a steady downward slide… sigh.

How to put it — a mindset that was already on the verge of collapse exploded all over again.

Life, truly is hard.

(End of chapter)