Postscript Everything related to this book

To be precise, "Nanjing" is not a breakthrough but a summary.

It is a story of the same type as Dead Fire, but based on Dead Fire, the story structure, language, and plot have been more carefully polished. After all, there was a lot of lack of experience and insufficiency when writing Dead Fire. There were many rough, contradictory, and exaggerated parts in the book. By the time I wrote Nanjing, I had summed up my experience and methods, and I was more restrained when writing. Its overall completion is higher than Dead Fire. Everything that should be written has been written, and it proceeds according to the outline (prologue). The final ending was also determined from the beginning.

Let’s talk about the beginning of the story.

"Nanjing" was originally inspired by Makoto Shinkai's animated film "Your Name".

When I watched the movie, I was moved by the theme of the story, "a boy and a girl are far apart in space but closely bound by fate", so I had a similar idea in my heart - why not write a story like this? After I finished "Titan", I picked up this idea, filled it in, and presented it to you readers, which is "We Live in Nanjing".

When setting up "Nanjing", there were many options, including "the heroine survives in the era of apocalyptic war," "the heroine is a soldier of the surviving resistance squad, and accidentally communicates with the past during the battle." Although it seems that the story conflicts will be more intense and the development will be more tortuous, they were eventually abandoned in favor of depicting a deserted, silent, and lonely future.

Before I started writing the book, I discussed with my editor about writing about such a doomsday, a world that is peaceful, beautiful, full of vitality, yet desolate to death. You could say that this was one of the goals of writing the book, just for this dish of vinegar-wrapped dumplings.

Many plot designs were also abandoned. Some of them were very interesting, but they did not fit the logic of the story, so they were discarded. For example, "When the male and female protagonists lost contact, Wang Ning mobilized all the HAMs in Nanjing to relay calls in the channel to search for them", "The key is valid for only fifteen years and cannot survive the long night of twenty years, so people designed a high-thrust spacecraft to accelerate the key to near the speed of light, using the clock slow effect to cross time", and "In order to support the future, humans launch a large number of nuclear bombs into space to slow down time, and at the critical moment when the swordsman arrives, the king returns and intercepts the swordsman outside the atmosphere to save the girl", and so on. However, writing a novel is a process of subtraction. The more content is not the better. On the premise of achieving the purpose of writing, the story should be simpler.

Since the original idea of ​​the story comes from Makoto Shinkai's animated film, I would consciously or unconsciously pay attention to its animation temperament during the creative process. I personally think that this book is just right for a 2D animated film, but there are too few people making animated films in China, so this cannot be forced. I will just wait for the right person.

However, "Nanjing" still did not achieve my expected goal. As a non-Nanjing native, it is still too difficult to write about this city well. Just a few short field trips are far from enough.

We still need to go deeper into life.

Finally, special thanks to:

Senior HAM, former PLA North Sea Fleet communications officer Lieutenant Colonel Lazycat,

Mr. Lin from the Public Security Bureau of Fuzhou City, Fujian Province,

And my old friend, Mr. Sanchi, a good citizen of Nanjing, served as the full-time technical consultant for this book and provided great help!

Best regards!

(End of this chapter)