Chapter 34

The contract application was rejected again.

The second application was rejected. Next time I have to wait fourteen days. However, the first application was rejected the next day; this time I waited five or six days before receiving the good-person card.

I think the main issue is that the writing style is too niche, and the recommendation and collection scores are poor. It would be good if the editor would come over to communicate and explain. (The good-person card says it will continue to follow…)

I see that books of the same type seem to get signed after just tens of thousands of words and can also earn monthly tickets. It's quite unbelievable, and of course I envy them.

I have been reading web novels for many years myself; I can basically tell what is good and what is bad. My aesthetic tendencies probably cannot be changed anymore, and I suppose the same goes for my writing.

As of today, only about two books have left a deep impression on me. One is Treacherous Ministers and Rebellious Sons. I remember that when I read it, I felt as if I smelled the fragrance of grass, and I still recall it to this day. After the eunuch in this book, I have been preoccupied with it to this day, and even today I am still following its Baidu tieba. Another is Overturning the Han. This book's depiction of the Chinese people's valuing righteousness over life is very moving. This point is also the inspiration for the chapter I wrote about Wang Ling's Florian. Everyone might notice that other people's chapters are either names or titles; only for Tangtuosi did I use a beautified nickname—I estimate Tangtuosi himself is also quite satisfied with this nickname—I did some polishing and whitewashing, not wanting him to appear sordid; at least, I wanted him to die in a way he himself would be satisfied with. In short, I think valuing righteousness over life may be one of the core spirits of us Chinese, and it is the eternal spiritual backbone of our nation. Speaking of core spirit, I personally feel there is another point, namely, patriotism. I definitely will not let the protagonist in the novel split off the northern border like in the TV drama. This viewpoint was also conveyed through some characters' dialogues.

Why mention what ethnicity and what core spirit? There are two reasons: first, in the cultural industry, I still believe that when competing with the West we are at a disadvantage; I think changing this competitive disadvantage relies only on China's own unique cultural core, just as in the sci-fi theme, Liu Cixin's Wandering Earth setting, with Earth wandering, is very core and charming—compared to other similar disaster sci-fi, we will never fall behind. Our spiritual core is the capital that keeps us invincible in cultural competition; second, the application of AI like ChatGPT will inevitably impact cultural creation or, as a tool, accelerate the production of garbage, which further demands that our writing not be generic and our plots not be formulaic, otherwise the result will be that we are inferior to AI and our spiritual cultural products will also become low-quality. I believe that some spiritual cores cannot be easily controlled by AI; this is our opportunity.

Finally, let me say why I write using POV. When I first read the original novel, I was shocked—I never thought a novel could be written this way. I remember that when I first looked at it, I would pick out some people's chapters to read, later I just read randomly. To feel his technique, I even pulled out the English version to read; anyway, comparing the two versions, I could roughly understand. This novel also made me realize that Western novel creators seem to have a higher level—this statement has no solid evidence, and I rarely read China's own published novels. Essentially, writing this way is to train my writing ability. In practice, I often get stuck; I have to think about what this character ultimately needs to see, encounter, why they should act, and how to serve the story. Currently, the plot difficulty is high, but I still have confidence. Another difficulty is the language itself. I lack writing talent; my word choice and sentence construction lack flexibility, so even describing a simple little plot in words feels troublesome. What frustrates me is that my sentences are not very smooth, compared to Martin's kind of paragraph-sentence natural transitions…… I think I need a long time of training to eliminate textual redundancy, increase writing skill, and make the article flow smoothly—what is meant by smooth is roughly the difference between good wine and bad.

I want to make good liquor.

That's all, thank you all good friends for your support.