Brick (1)
Brick (1)
I watched Suho head toward the bathroom while I dried myself off after washing.
‘Since I taught him properly last time, he should be able to manage on his own now, right?’
Suho was a strange kid who constantly drew my attention. The way he spoke made him seem like an adult, but his actions were unmistakably childish.
‘Well… it’s not really my business.’
Even though I had grown close to him, I had never intended to spend the rest of my life with him.
That was right.
We were destined to part ways someday.
‘Don’t get too involved.’
Something about Suho’s father bothered me. From the way he spoke and acted, it seemed as though he was even more obsessed with me than he was with his own son.
He watched everything I did, and he seemed to feel more familiar with me than with Suho, his own son.
Almost as if he had found a daughter he had lost.
‘Am I just overthinking this?’
Maybe I was being overly self-conscious.
Perhaps it was simply because I had suddenly found myself receiving so much attention from people.
‘Come to think of it, I don’t actually know much about Suho.’
“Phew…”
I considered going back to my room, but I needed to wait for Suho to come out so I could make sure he had actually washed properly.
Rather than sending him back from the bedroom, I figured it would be better to send him on his way from the living room, so I flopped down onto the sofa again.
The time I had been given was far too precious to waste doing nothing.
Even though I had become younger for the time being, once I returned, I might end up even older than I had been before.
I had to prepare everything in advance, one thing at a time.
At the very least, I had to do that if I wanted to avoid dying in an undignified state.
‘It’s about time I started preparing.’
I took out my phone and opened the first work I had decided to write.
It was the only 19+ title among the four works selected for the preliminary lineup.
Out of all the 19+ works, it had received the most votes.
Even considering that all-ages works naturally had a much wider pool of readers, the fact that this was the only adult-rated title selected still bothered me.
‘Is this really the right one to write first?’
I had originally decided to make it the first work I would present and had already begun writing it, but I still lacked confidence.
And for good reason.
It was the work that had first forced me to shut down the comment section.
It was also the work that earned me a great deal of harsh criticism.
In the end, because of my own stubbornness, I had blocked the comments on my first work, practically driving readers away.
It was the work that transformed the younger me, who used to laugh and cry over every single comment.
“Phew.”
I couldn’t even remember whether this had been my third work or my fourth.
It was the beginning of my journey into 19+ fiction.
Strangely enough, there were so many words that could be used to describe this particular work.
The premise was unusual, but it wasn’t exactly something that had never been done before.
The protagonist was a former holy knight who ended up marrying a gumiho. Whenever he confessed, in his mind, the things he could never bring himself to say to his wife, as though making a secret confession, she somehow came to know what he was thinking.
“The premise doesn’t seem that bad… So why did I ever put this on hiatus?”
It had been my first attempt at writing an adult-rated novel.
It was written during a time when I was emotionally troubled and unable to control my sexual urges.
Back then, I had believed that simply describing sexual acts would make the views and settlement payments pour in.
As a result, the actual story became less and less important.
I kept writing only the scenes that attracted high view counts.
Before long, the plot became stagnant, as though I had completely lost my way.
No matter how much I tried to move the story forward, neither the hero nor the heroine developed in any meaningful way.
In a desperate attempt to shake things up, I suddenly introduced an orphaned child into the story, almost as though I had adopted the character on the spot.
But instead of helping, the child only became an obstacle.
‘Can I even call this a novel? Ah…’
I finally remembered why I had stopped writing it.
Both the hero and the heroine had lost their goals.
It was a story I had been writing live, without even having a proper plot.
I simply wrote down my thoughts as they surfaced whenever I became sexually aroused, as though I were releasing them directly onto the page.
‘Of course I ended up abandoning it.’
Human sexual desire couldn't be infinite.
There were only so many positions and scenes that could be described in writing.
And had the characters I could develop changed over time?
No.
The characters themselves needed to change, even if only little by little.
Because a story wasn't supposed to stand still.
‘So that's what it was…’
I had finally realized something important.
Did I really have to look back like this before I could understand it?
‘Was I really this stupid?’
I couldn't understand how I had ever managed to make money from a work like this.
“Now that I look at it, forget the bad prose. It’s just difficult to read.”
Back then, I had been writing web novels, but I myself had always read novels in book form, so I hadn't realized it.
After writing something, I only thought about how it would look on the screen the author saw.
I had been afraid that the thoughts and ideas of other writers might needlessly occupy my mind.
I was afraid that I might pick up useless things like jealousy from seeing successful authors.
But now that I thought about it, aside from when I had first discovered web novels, I hadn't read a single web novel throughout the entire period I had been serializing my work.
‘Not even my own writing.’
The books I was accustomed to reading had pages wide enough to fit a considerable amount of text across each line.
Web novels, on the other hand, were books meant to be read on phones with much narrower screens.
I hadn't considered the difference between the two mediums.
It wasn't particularly noticeable when reading on a large monitor or laptop, but the more I read, the more suffocating it became.
‘Brick. That word really does suit it perfectly.’
Even the most delicious food would become unappetizing if it looked bizarre enough. You would get tired of looking at it before you even had a chance to taste it.
No matter how accustomed someone was to traditional books, this was simply too much.
Even I could barely breathe as I read it—
So this was what people meant when they said a story was suffocatingly frustrating.
Back then, I had written with my limited knowledge.
I had written using only the basic framework I had learned in compulsory education: beginning, development, climax, and conclusion.
Naturally, I failed to deliver the fast-paced progression demanded by web novels.
As a result, people often called me a frustrating author who dragged out every situation and kept making readers wait endlessly for something to happen.
‘To begin with, the writing itself doesn’t flow smoothly.’
Maybe it looked even worse because I was the one who had written it.
No. They say even a hedgehog thinks its own babies are beautiful.
‘Even giving it the benefit of the doubt because I wrote it myself, it’s still hard to consider this a web novel.’
When I had looked at it in the bound book Suho had kept, it hadn't seemed that bad.
But I had failed to understand the fundamental characteristics of web novels, which most readers read on their phones.
‘Wasn’t it inevitable that my grades would keep dropping?’
A story didn't necessarily have to be filled with nothing but satisfying, cathartic moments.
Writing that way probably wasn't easy in the first place.
But was it really right to do nothing but frustrate the readers?
“I need to twist it.”
“What?”
“Kyahhh?!”
I screamed in surprise when Suho suddenly stuck his head into view.
“Noona, were you looking at something dirty? Why are you so surprised?”
“Uh, yeah. No! Do I look like some kid who would be startled because she got caught looking at something dirty?!”
Suho shook his head from side to side.
“True. You were the one who only used to write dirty stuff, Noona.”
“…I wrote all-ages stuff too, you know?”
“Oh. Right.”
“Exactly.”
Seeing Suho back to his usual mischievous self, as if the dispirited expression he had worn in the dining room had never existed, made me feel at ease.
“Why were you so angry earlier?”
“What? At whom?”
“Your father.”
“Because Dad kept saying ridiculous things.”
It seemed the situation had caused a misunderstanding.
After all, his father had basically introduced this little brat as the person who would become his fiancée.
Perhaps, since I looked relatively mature, his father had simply meant that I should take good care of his son.
‘Well, I do have to keep living with him for a while anyway.’
“You shouldn't talk so harshly about your own father. Come here.”
“Why?”
I grabbed Suho by both cheeks, making him flinch.
“Open your mouth.”
“What?!”
“Why are you so surprised? I'm just checking whether you brushed your teeth properly.”
“…Do you really have to hold my cheeks?”
“That’s so I can hold you still and look from side to side. Think of them as handles.”
The cheeks beneath my hands quickly turned red.
“Calling them handles is a little weird, Noona.”
“What’s wrong with it? Now, say ‘ah.’ Hurry.”
I held onto him as he kept making strange remarks and began inspecting his mouth from every angle.
It seemed he hadn't been lying when he said he brushed his teeth every day.
There wasn't even a trace of the kind of tartar that would have built up if he hadn't brushed for a long time.
“How long are you going to keep staring, Noona?”
I tore my eyes away from Suho's slightly moving lips.
Maybe it was because I'd been reading those kinds of works so often lately, but strange thoughts kept circling around in my head.
“Yeah. Good job.”
“But, Noona, why are you here instead of in bed?”
Suho asked as he casually perched himself on the armrest of the sofa.
“Nothing. Maybe I was keeping an eye on you?”
“What do you mean, keeping an eye on me? Hurry up and go to bed. There really isn't much time left now. Have you decided what you're going to do first?”
“I have, but…”
Honestly, I wasn't confident.
I really wasn't confident at all.
“If you've decided, then you've decided. Why are you so unsure?”
“Just because.”
I mumbled for a moment before continuing.
“It's just… even though I wrote it myself, reading it made me feel suffocated.”
“What about it was suffocating?”
“Everything?”
It was difficult to pinpoint any one particular thing.
Once I found one thing I disliked, I gradually began disliking everything.
“The way the story progresses, for one thing. And even though they're 19+ scenes, they don't really feel impactful. On top of that, I wrote it in a way that makes it difficult to read.”
“You really were terrible at paragraph breaks, Noona.”
‘Was I really that bad?’
No matter how much I disliked my own work, there was a difference between criticizing myself and hearing someone else criticize it.
I had written every word of it with my own hands.
Maybe this was what it felt like to hear someone insult your own child.
“Noona.”
“Hmm?”
“Are you angry?”
“No. I'm just a little annoyed because you said I was terrible at paragraph breaks.”
I turned my eyes away from Suho and back toward my phone.
‘He could at least have found something nice to say. Why did he have to put it like that?’
“You sleep by yourself.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to write. Turn on the stream for me.”
“……Okay.”