Hello everyone. It has been a while. I have been distracted by work and a few other things. When I finally started having time to write again I started thinking about what I wanted to do. When I would look at this work I realized that I was no longer interested in writing it. I learned quite a bit from it and am grateful for all of your support while I did so. I am sorry that I have become one of those people that started something and didn't finish it but when I look at this story I realized it had stopped being something that created joy for me and had becomes something I felt an obligation to. Now, after all this time I just don't feel like continuing this story.

My takeaways-

The early parts were especially rough. I blame myself, because when I first wrote this, it was a parody of wuxias and I had peppered it full of tropes I had started to hate. That was easily 5 years ago. Last year I got the itch to start writing again and opted to dust this off and edit it into something different. I didn't spend enough time scrubbing it though and many of those early chapters were just plain boring.

Furthermore I underestimated the desires a lot of people have to self insert into a story so I didn't really think about how people would react to some of the choices the mc was making, and I didn't think at all that having a pubescent boy with a low libido would be such a bad thing. lol, clearly I was wrong. SImilarly, it seems I underestimated how bloodthirsty a lot of readers can be when I wrote the situation with his cousins beating him up. I will need to either avoid the bullying trope in the future or handle it better.

I think one issue with introducing Alicia was that people automatically thought she would be the female lead just because she was the first girl I introduced that wasn't related to him. I have some obstinate people that tell me regularly that you just don't do that, that all people invest into the character as if they are the female lead and that if the girl gets with anyone else it is naturally an NTR situation. That wasn't what I was trying to imply at all with my story and I will have to give more thought to how I handle situations like that in the future.

One thing I noticed as we kept going was that I was losing the MC's agency as I continued to write. The further we went the more I realized he was more of a witness to the events than the person driving them.

Those are my takeaways for now. I learned quite a bit while writing this. Not just the lessons mentioned here, but also the amount of time you have to spend just to get this much out, how much effort it is to maintain a schedule, etc. I will say my greatest takeaway was a greater respect for the effort a lot of these authors have to put in and I definitely learned that I needed to rethink how I commented in the stories around here because even the worst put together thing on here was something someone put a ton of effort into and I am certainly not paying these people for the free content they have provided for me. It was definitely a lesson in humility and gratitude.

Anyways thank you all for following this story. I am currently writing notes for a couple other ideas and I still intend to occasionally write chapters for the other project I have already placed on RR. I don't promise any regular uploads though as work and continuing education demand far more out of me than they did before, but either way I hope you all find great stories that are worth your time around here. One thing I was pretty happy about today was hearing that one of my favorite wn's got a live action adaptation in "Joy of Life"... I don't quite know how that's written in chinese.