I've read the recent comments, and I more or less understand the problems everyone has raised. First, let me say I'm not a seasoned author — in the past I would send submissions to magazines or public accounts and write a little realistic-fiction material, making a few hundred yuan a piece. Last month I happened to be reading a family-cultivation web novel, and figured I had nothing much on any time soon, so I thought I'd write a bit, purely to polish my prose.
I dashed off an outline at random, gave a few names to suit my own taste, never sparing a thought for things like generational naming. Yet before I knew it, the signed-contract message came after a few days of writing, then the first-round recommendation, the second, the third, all the way to this fourth round, and it's all gone through. I really didn't expect it. This book was thrown together, so the opening is truly careless — there's an inborn sense of deficiency to it.
And the so-called non-protagonist protagonist — back then I only thought that the protagonist of a family novel should be the whole family rather than any single person, so I simply decided to use one of the family's magic artifacts as the point of entry. I didn't weigh it much at all. Writing on to today, I find myself rather constrained and fumbling.
This book was never meant to be a novel chasing after gratification. To be frank, I've been reading for twenty years, and I've grown tired and weary of it. The reason I picked up the pen myself is that today's gratification fiction can no longer hold me, and I wanted to try, as far as I could, to write the characters out on the page.
But it's hard. One or two is manageable, but to carve out over a dozen distinct and vivid characters — I truly don't know whether I can manage. I can only say I'll do my best. The goal of this book is not to sizzle or to earn any particular result; the author only wants to do his utmost to finish writing it.
Some readers have also said — ah, a book without a protagonist that lurches east and west leaves you with no sense of involvement, and it's only the flavor of the supporting cast and the prose that barely hold the interest, giving one the feeling of an onlooker. That problem truly is hard to solve, and so far I have no good method. I'll just keep writing and see — maybe as I go I'll be able to distill a style and a craft of my own.
I'm sorry to the readers who wanted a clean piece of gratification fiction, and sorry to the readers of artifact-spirit stories and behind-the-scenes-mastermind stories. This is my first book: a family novel in which the group is the protagonist.
I won't fuss over this book's results, nor over where it fails to match the traits of conventional web fiction — merely to sit together with everyone and watch these dozens of people grow, bloom, and wither. Perhaps my next book will absorb all the experience amassed here and truly produce a competent web novel.