The People's Literature Publishing House recently released the last volume of "Celebrating More Than Years" (Revised Edition) - the fourteenth volume of "Chaotianzi", which lasted five years and finally came out. This article is a postscript to the book and is published with the permission of the publisher.
I have said in many places that the name "Celebrating More Than Years" has an easter egg meaning, that is, I want to go to Daqing to spend more than one year.
After I finished writing this book in 2009, I went to Daqing, which has been 14 years. To be able to have this journey in my life, the first thing I am grateful for is of course my parents' open-mindedness, love and tolerance for me.
My mother passed away in 2017, and I missed her very much, so I wrote her name in front of this volume this time to remind myself that I still have to miss it often.
After all these years, looking back at the past, there are naturally many differences, there are still proud, and there are also many dissatisfactions, mainly because of the rough text and plot errors brought about by the update pressure of the Internet serials at that time.
For example, the section on the assassination of the Hanging Temple, when I wrote it, I had 9,000 words a day, and I felt hearty, but now when I revised it, I found that there were holes everywhere, just like that temple, leaking everywhere.
Therefore, when the People's Literature Publishing House proposed to publish it, my only request was to give me time to revise it slowly...... Sure enough, it was very slow, and another three years passed.
The principle of this revision is simple. The first is not to change the plot, because a novelist from his thirties to his forties cannot suddenly improve his ability to construct a plot, so I only made a relatively large change in the last volume—in fact, that was what I was going to do back then. The second is that the text should be deleted to a clean road, but it should not be sharpened as much as possible, and the wildness of the online text should be retained.
In the end, I calculated that the 3.5 million words of "Celebrating More Than Years" at the time of serialization were deleted and revised by nearly one million words this time, which basically squeezed out the water, and the effect presented was not bad. The only regret is that when I revised the first volume, I didn't know how to do the revision, and I was constrained, and the final result was not very satisfactory, and I don't know if there was a chance to make up for it in the future.
On the way to revision, I asked Ah Chou and determined that some of the poems in "Celebrating More Than Years" were written by her, and after more than ten years, I thanked her again.
This time, for the sake of revision, it is rare to seriously reread the novel several times, and I feel a little emotional. I still don't like Fan Xian very much, because he is too much like us, especially now, but I still like this story very much, and I like many people in this story. I still like the conversation between Chen Pingping and the emperor in the imperial study before she died, and I like that I basically didn't move much this time.
- He can live like this for the rest of his life, why revenge, why does he have so much responsibility?
When I wrote "Celebrating More Than Years" more than ten years ago, it was also the time when I felt the most responsible.
When I was writing Suzaku before, I had to take one day off a week, and then I stopped. It is a pity that it has not been able to create a different possibility for the labor system in this industry. At that time, I wrote really seriously, and I had to write until late at night in the cold winter wax moon, every day in the second-floor home of Minsheng Home on Shenzhen Road in Yichang, with a stove under my feet, an air conditioner on it, a military coat, and fingerless gloves to keep typing on the keyboard, and I still felt very cold...... It's not that the family conditions are difficult, it's just that the South is like this. Later, I went to Daqing and saw the heating, so I knew what happiness looked like, so I hurriedly installed heating at home in Hubei. With the four seasons like spring, no matter where you write stories or type on the keyboard, it will not be cold, but it is difficult to work as hard as when you wrote "Celebrating More Than Years".
I'm glad that I had the right mindset at the right time, did the right thing, wrote this story, got to know everyone, and was known by everyone.
When I finished "Celebrating More Than Years" in 2009, I wrote a long postscript on the Internet, and many new readers over the years, readers of this set of paper books, may not have seen it. I am attaching the original text to confirm my thoughts at that time and your feelings, and I hope that you can see me who was writing "Celebrating More Than Years" fifteen years ago.