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ch 1 ##Resuming the Serialization
The greatest pleasure in my life. YouTube.
My only drug, something I could enjoy while lying in bed after taking a shower.
I couldn't hold back the laughter that naturally escaped me.
“Hehehe.”
But suddenly, ominous footsteps could be heard.
Thump, thump.
My head instinctively turned.
The door opened, and the owner of the footsteps called out to me.
“Oppa, can't you stop watching YouTube for a bit?”
“You heard that?”
“Yeah. I told you I have a deadline.”
Shin Miso. My wife.
After glaring at me for a moment, my wife irritably closed the door and left when I lowered the YouTube volume.
Bang.
I had clearly checked that the door to my wife's study was closed before coming into the room.
And yet she had heard the sound...
She had incredible hearing.
‘Is it because she's working?’
Could it be because of the peculiar nature of being a web novel writer?
My wife habitually said that coming up with new stories every single day was difficult.
Perhaps because of that, whenever she entered her study and started typing on the keyboard, she became extremely
sensitive.
“If it's that hard, then don't do it.”
Those words rose all the way to my throat, but I held them back.
Because the moment I said that, this place would turn into a battlefield.
Winning a fight isn't difficult.
I'm a much more logical person than my wife.
But even if you win the battle, negotiations to end the war still remain.
And those negotiations always leave me at a disadvantage.
In the end, to make peace, I have to make my wife feel better.
And making peace always consumes a great deal of mental energy.
“Oppa, are you a T? Why can't you empathize with me at all?”
Couldn't she at least empathize with the fact that I couldn't empathize?
It wasn't that I couldn't empathize. I simply couldn't understand.
To begin with, I wasn't the one who forced her to write.
It was her dream.
She loved novels and wanted to become a writer. And eventually, she became the writer she had always wanted to be.
Then couldn't she just enjoy writing?
No, fundamentally, I couldn't agree that writing was difficult.
I liked novels too.
Honestly, if we were talking purely in terms of experience, I had probably read more novels than my wife.
And I often found myself thinking this.
“I could write something like this too.”
Then, without fail, my wife would criticize me.
“That's because you've never tried writing. Do you know how difficult it is to write 5,000 characters every single day?”
I never argued with my wife.
To refute her, I needed evidence, and that would mean bringing up the past.
The fact that I had once been a web novel writer too.
Back then, I hadn't had much trouble serializing my work, and my results had been good.
Because I had the experience, I could confidently say that writing wasn't difficult.
But I couldn't.
Because I didn't have the right to.
I had signed a contract and even published my first work. And it was around that time that I met my wife.
I fell in love with her at first sight. My feelings for her burned like fire.
I wanted to become closer to her and get to know her better.
When she told me she was an aspiring writer, I pretended to be an aspiring writer too.
We had the same hobbies and goals, so we quickly became close and eventually started dating.
But there was a side effect.
At the time, I was so deeply in love with my wife that I neglected my serialization.
At first, I took a hiatus. Taking one break was difficult, but taking a second was easy.
After repeatedly taking breaks, I changed my serialization schedule.
Three times a week. Once a month.
Then eventually, I stopped the serialization indefinitely.
Even so, I was happy.
In exchange for losing my readers, I had gained the woman I loved as my wife.
Why didn't I confess that I was a writer?
After we promised to get married, I asked my wife.
“What do you think about writers who stop their series midway?”
“Stop midway? They're the worst. I really hate people who are that irresponsible.”
That day, I made a decision.
I decided to keep the fact that I had been a writer a secret from my wife.
Her marriage with me was happy.
Because I truly loved her.
But as time passed, my wife's irritation grew worse.
It was probably after she debuted as the writer she had dreamed of becoming.
Perhaps writing was stressful for her, because whenever she was working, she did nothing else.
Naturally, all the housework became mine.
But I wasn't a person with nothing else to do either.
During the day, I had to go to the cafe my parents ran and help them with their work.
Living as a dutiful son was truly exhausting.
Of course, my parents complained that their unfilial son was taking too much of his salary.
I worked during the day, and in the evening, I had to clean up after my wife.
“Honey, can't you clean up after you eat?”
“Later.”
I hadn't known before marriage.
That my wife and I had completely different lifestyles.
My father-in-law had spoiled his daughter too much.
But I wasn't her father.
I thought things would get better with time.
A man and woman who had lived in different ways for decades.
It probably wasn't easy to suddenly adjust to living together after marriage.
I understood that, but honestly, I was hurt that she didn't even make an effort to adjust.
Then one day, something happened.
“Oppa, let's get divorced.”
My wife suddenly asked for a divorce one day.
She said she wanted to focus on writing.
Everything I had been holding back exploded.
“Aren't you already focusing on it?”
I had adjusted everything around her writing.
And the result was a demand for divorce.
It was unfair to end things like this.
Shouldn't she at least make an effort too?
After getting married, my wife had only thought about herself.
“As expected, you're not a writer, so you just don't understand...”
Right. That was the problem.
My wife had a professional superiority complex about being a writer.
Now that things had come to this, I wanted to confess that I had once been a writer too.
But I couldn't.
“I've fallen in love with someone.”
My wife casually told me that she had been cheating on me behind my back.
Was it a lie to make me agree to the divorce?
Looking into her eyes, I knew it wasn't.
For the first time since we got married, I became angry with my wife.
“Who!!”
“...Writer Doha.”
Jeong Dongha, the CEO of DH Company.
I knew him quite well too. He was a famous web novel writer under the pen name Doha.
And he was the head of the management company my wife belonged to.
My wife said she loved him.
After hearing that, some of her actions suddenly seemed strange.
The publishing company had provided her with a studio, and there had been many days when my wife didn't come home.
I thought she was working outside for my sake.
I thought our married life was simply changing.
But I was being discarded by my wife like a document file being thrown into the trash.
“Why?”
A woman I had fallen in love with at first sight. The woman I had loved more than anyone else in this world.
I had done everything I could to support her so that she could pursue her dream.
A wave of betrayal washed over me.
“Dongha is a genius. Whenever I talk to him, I feel like I'm growing.”
My wife spouted nonsense.
Self-justification meant to romanticize her affair.
“I think I talked about my work with you a lot too...”
“But you're not a writer, Oppa.”
I was left speechless by my wife's answer.
I thought I knew her well, but she suddenly felt like a stranger.
‘Was she always like this?’
My heart grew cold.
“Do you want to succeed as a writer that badly?”
I couldn't understand why my wife wanted to succeed as a writer badly enough to get divorced.
“Yeah...”
I had once abandoned writing for her sake.
And now she was saying that she would leave me for the sake of writing.
A hollow feeling washed over me.
“Fine. Let's get divorced.”
The divorce with my wife proceeded quickly.
Since my wife was at fault because of her affair, I received some alimony, and I decided to keep the house we were
currently living in as well.
Perhaps because she now had a boyfriend who was a successful writer and made good money, my wife didn't make a fuss over
these things.
After returning home with the divorce papers, I had fun like a crazy man.
I wanted to shake off the feelings of betrayal and emptiness.
Time alone for the first time in years.
I ordered late-night food and freely watched whatever dramas and movies I wanted on TV.
I drank beer alone and played music loudly.
I enjoyed the things I couldn't do while my wife was around and consoled myself over becoming a divorced man.
Why had I given up these things because of my wife?
I regretted it.
I entered the study where my wife had worked.
It was filled with traces of the woman who had wanted to become a writer.
‘A writer...’
I thought of the novel I had stopped serializing long ago.
Sitting in front of the computer, I logged into Glpia, where I had written my novel.
After getting married, I had used my wife's account together with her, so it had been a very long time since I had
actually logged in.
‘What was the password again...?’
After several failed attempts, I finally managed to log in, and the pen name appeared.
[ Min Seong-yoon ]
A pen name made by reversing my real name, Yoon Seong-min.
When I entered my library, there was one paid web novel.
The web novel I had stopped serializing in the past.
The last serialization date was March 1, 2020.
Three years had already passed.
Looking at it, I saw that there was an announcement I had written on March 31, 2020.
[ This is Min Seong-yoon. ]
* I'm sorry. Due to personal circumstances, I had to suddenly stop the serialization.
At the time, I had left the announcement at the editor's request.
[ This is Min Seong-yoon. ]
* I will return as quickly as possible.
I had promised to return quickly, but three years had already passed.
‘They've all left, right?’
When I first stopped the serialization, I had received a lot of abuse from my readers.
It was only natural.
I had wanted to think of myself as a romanticist who had left in pursuit of love, but in reality, I had simply been an
irresponsible person.
But something about the status of my web novel was strange.
<Still my No.1>
The first web novel I had ever written.
It was about a manager who had returned to the past and raised the singer under his management into a global star.
But strangely, the number of favorites had increased compared to before.
The last time I had checked, there had been around 15,000 favorites.
But now, there were 30,000.
I had stopped the serialization at 200 chapters, but the number of purchases was strange too.
‘It's over twenty thousand...’
When I stopped the serialization, the management company had also stopped sending me my settlements.
That was why I hadn't known it had gotten this high.
It seemed that the work I had abandoned was still steadily selling.
‘People are still reading a series that was discontinued...’
I entered the work and checked the comments.
* I don't even know what chapter this is, but I'm reading it from the beginning again.
* Author, are you alive?
* I believe you'll come back someday.
* You have to read this legendary manager novel. You won't regret it!
There had been a lot of insults before. Now it was different.
Even after three years, people still remembered me and were waiting for me.
I sat down and read all the comments for the first time in a long while.
I was grateful, but I also felt sorry.
I regretted leaving people like this behind.
I wanted to turn back time.
After thinking about it for a while, I started writing.
After revising it several times, I left a single announcement.
[ This is Min Seong-yoon. ]
* I'm resuming the serialization.