Chinese GL

Today Ning Yuan nearly gave me a heart attack by posting on Weibo that she was hoping to wrap up To Embers We Return by the end of the month. Because I have no idea how she's going to pull that off, short of dropping 30k-word chunks of text on us per day. Currently she's giving us 5k to 6k per day, which is generous but still well short of the length she'd need to wrap things up satisfactorily. I've been following the novel as it serialises, and while I feel we're definitely closer to the end than the beginning, I'd have estimated that we're only about 65% of the way in. She's also just introduced a major plot complication (which I love but also am now worried about it not being properly resolved), and one of the secondary couples has just had their first kiss. And there's just so many plot threads that need dealing with, at least some of which — crucially — didn't even need to be in the novel unless she was planning to address them.

I was not alone in panicking over the prospect of a 'rocks fall, everyone dies' hasty ending. A number of other readers responded to the post similarly. Ning Yuan popped in to reassure one reader that 'I'm not rushing; everything that needs to be written will be properly written, if I can't finish it by the end of the month, I'll aim for next month.' But even December seems like a huge stretch, even if she starts posting multiple chapters a day (which to be fair she did previously suggest she might eventually do).

Anyway, we shall see. I haven't read all of Ning Yuan's novels, but she's stuck the landing on every single one I've read so far. Structurally, she's one of the most competent webnovelists I've read. Still, I was not expecting such a rapid reminder that translating a novel that's still serialising is a bad, bad idea. Oh well, I knew that going in, so there's absolutely no one I can blame except myself. I swear, if I'm going to spend the next five years of my life translating this novel, and the five years after that writing fix-it fic, I... well, I'll do it, but that doesn't mean I won't be complaining about it the whole way.