Author-nim, Please Do Community Activities Through Mutual Agreement (7)
Only after taking a thorough scolding from Suho was I finally able to resume the stream.
There were three things he had hammered home, over and over. First, stick to conversations I could actually handle. Second, gauge the fallout of whatever I was about to say before I said it. And third, show the audience a side of me different from before by engaging with them actively.
Is it even possible to chat away, actively engaging people, while simultaneously pre-measuring the blast radius of every word? It felt no different from being told to stare at the left wall and describe what stood on the right — but there was nothing to be done about it.
A short, deep breath, and I switched on the mic.
"All right... I'm back... Let's get the vote started. Just pick the work you're most eager to see first out of the twenty-nine! The list is up on your screens."
I'd decided to reuse the intro screen Suho had put together. Each work had been assigned a simple number, and I was running the vote through the stream's built-in polling feature.
Still can't keep up with the speed...
Ignoring the chat pouring in without end, I kept my eyes fixed on the tallying poll — until, before long, I snapped out of it.
Crap. Stare at the chat like this and the donations will start rolling in again.
There was something unexpectedly slimy about taking money for doing nothing at all. It felt like making a living off my face alone.
"Looks like we've got about five minutes left before the vote closes."
I'd tossed the line out casually, and now I checked how the chat took it. Several thousand votes were already in, and a whole cluster of works was locked in a neck-and-neck race.
"While we wait, I thought we could talk about how I'll be handling the works from here on."
"Ah — of course, as for the schedule: whichever works place first will be rolled out quickly as daily serials. Thirty seconds left now."
A surprising stretch of time crawled by — long enough to make me wonder how thirty seconds had ever felt this endless — before the notice finally popped up.
"All right. Shall we see the results?"
What am I supposed to do with this...
The results showed not one winner but four.
This I never saw coming... Not even two — a four-way tie.
"Uh... it's a tie between four works. What should I do..."
"I'll run a revote with just these four. Two of the four will be serialized first, and the remaining two will follow after those."
The moment the poll reopened, the chat flooded with people chanting their votes. I watched the rapid-fire scroll for a while before catching myself again. Lose focus for even a moment, it seemed, and all I did was stare blankly at the endless river of chat.
"While the revote runs, let me walk you through the schedule ahead: first, I'll be serializing these four works."
I'd clear the four top picks first, then either hold another vote when it was time to prepare the next batch or, by then, perhaps simply choose for myself.
Taking the first step was always the hardest part.
Of the four, two ran past a hundred episodes and two hadn't even reached fifty. The one mercy was that only a single title was rated for adults.
Rereading everything I'd written before, it was the adult scenes that struck me as strangely off. Was it because the way I looked at things had changed? The scenes built on feeling passing between two people were fine — it was the narration describing the acts themselves that read foreign to me. Maybe that was why, oddly enough, I felt my breath catch in my throat again and again while going back through my old serialized chapters.
Let's give the adult title a long, unhurried runway.
Two of the four had been crowd-pleasers; the other two, decidedly not. I couldn't tell you why the poorly received ones had made the cut, but curiosity about what came next didn't necessarily track with popularity — so I decided to take the result in stride.
"To start, I'll focus on the two past a hundred episodes and finish them off one by one, as fast as I can."
Considering how much quality would sag while juggling several serials at once, the ones I could finish quickly were the ones I needed to finish first.
Just as Suho feared, I was worried too. But unlike before, this many people existed around me now.
Perhaps purely to shake off the fear creeping over me, I'd teased Suho — and the chat's reaction was largely favorable.
Naturally, there were plenty of worried voices mixed in as well. Two daily serials might sound simple if you didn't think too hard about it, but actually pulling it off could be a punishing process.
My plan was to run the remakes first, build up a stockpile of chapters, then shift into scheduled releases while refining what came next and writing without pause — and, laying it all out to put Suho at ease, I announced:
"I'll post the serialization start date on the stream's community board."
"Even if it takes a while..."
That was as far as I could go on my own. There was still paperwork to sort out, and approval for the remakes had yet to come down.
I shot Suho a quick glance, and a message from him popped up in chat:
"It'll begin within the week."
The timeframe Suho had given from the very start was also one week — but announcing it like this had bought me a little extra breathing room.
"All right then, that's it for today's stream! I'll give you all a heads-up before I go live next time."
Perhaps because it was only my second stream, I'd managed to carry the whole thing with a steadiness I hadn't expected.
"Stream's over! Aigoo... that was exhausting..."
An inexplicable sense of liberation washed over me.
So having strangers watch me was this draining.
"Oops."
While I stood there flustered, the stream window went dark — Suho, it seemed, had ended it for me.
Here comes another earful.
"Nuna — and you were planning to stream all on your own like this?"
Sure enough, Suho launched into his scolding.
"I know, I just didn't realize there'd be this much to think about."
So this was why he'd asked me to check in with him first before saying anything to the community — on the channel or on Novel World...?
There's surprisingly a lot to keep straight.
"Anyway... good work today."
"Yeah."
Maybe I looked too pitiful, floundering there, because Suho let out a small sigh and left the room.
I reread the novels I would have to write, from their prologues onward, over and over. Some lines had me wondering whether I'd truly once been capable of writing them; others had me wondering why on earth I'd ever bothered with the description at all.
There were far too many passages I couldn't make sense of — not read generously, and not read harshly either.
The real danger looming over the serialization ahead was that I would have to keep writing these novels — novels with no solid worldbuilding and no organized character notes to speak of.
This was outright suicide...
Some works only needed tidying up, but others would have to be torn down and rebuilt practically from the foundation up.
"Suho."
"Yes?"
"You've read all of my writing, haven't you?"
Suho nodded with theatrical reluctance.
"I have. Why?"
"Nothing — I just got curious what my strengths actually are."
"Yours?"
"Yeah."
No matter how many times I went back through my own work, the question only grew: what were my strengths? Not the ones I saw in myself — the ones readers felt in my writing.
"You set up your hooks well and pay them off, and you move between emotional and physical description so freely that a reader can feast on a single work from beginning to end."
So basically he's calling me a buffet.
"So nothing stands out enough to call a real strength — it's all just sort of middling?"
"I suppose you could see it that way."
"Hmm..."
Somehow, having asked, I'd only grown more confused.
"Don't stew over it too much. Everyone sees your strengths differently."
"Right. I want to play to my strengths where I can — but honestly, I can't tell what I'm good at. That's why I asked."
"Playing to your strengths might be even harder, so how about shoring up your weaknesses instead?"
"My weaknesses?"
"Mm-hm."
Strengths might take real digging to find, but weaknesses? One skim of the community boards or the comment sections would turn up plenty.
And maybe I could fix the flaws only I could feel. Having become someone else entirely — wasn't this exactly my chance to change? Yes. Let's start changing now.
"Besides the update schedule, what else could there be...?"
"Try working that one out on your own, Nuna. If I tell you, it might just plant a bias."
"Fair enough. By the way — have you eaten?"
"Not yet."
"Then should we at least eat first?"
"Would that be okay?"
"No, no — it's better this way. With this kind of thing, the best ideas come when you think while doing something else."
Whenever I hit a wall, it was the away-from-the-page stuff — a shower, a meal — that shook the answers loose. I needed that kind of time now, too. Time to seal the writing and myself in separate rooms for a while, and study it all from a distance.
"Then let's eat out today."
"Huh?"
"My father probably hasn't eaten yet either. Let's ask him to join us."
"With your father?"
"Yes. He's curious about you."
"Out of nowhere...? That's... a lot."
"Then all the better."
For a moment there, I seemed to have forgotten that I'd signed a contract with a devil of the vilest kind.