Culinary God in Wilderness

The book will be going premium tomorrow at 12 PM. From then until the end of November, I’ll be updating with 10,000 characters a day.

To be honest, I’ve been writing for three and a half years, and my results have been on a steady incline. In my first year on Faloo, my first fan-fiction novel earned me only 1,800 yuan after 560,000 characters. My second book earned 1,800 yuan with just 370,000 characters, but the plot fell apart, so I dropped it. With my third book, I started writing gourmet fiction and earned a stable income of just over 3,000 yuan a month, finishing it at over 800,000 characters.

After that, I moved to Fanqie and tried genres like xuanhuan, apocalypse, and western fantasy. But I eventually found that gourmet fiction was my comfort zone. My personal best was writing two books at once and earning over 10,000 yuan in a single month, though that really just averaged out to 5,000 for each book, and it only happened during their debut month. It’s a shame; I learned a ton of theory, but everything I wrote was crap. Power-fantasy novels are so damn hard to write.

After coming to Qidian, I started many books, but 70-80% of them flopped and were dropped after just a few tens of thousands of characters. Only the gourmet novels gained any traction. My first one finished with only 400 average subscriptions. My second one peaked at 1,100, but that only lasted for two days before it dropped, eventually finishing with a stable 800-plus. It was then I realized I really don’t have much talent. I’m just grinding it out, writing through sheer perseverance and the patience I developed working as a cook, refusing to give up even after bashing my head against a wall over and over.

I was starting to feel like I couldn’t do anything new with gourmet fiction. I figured readers must be tired of just cooking and diner reactions, and writing it felt like serving a prison sentence. Plus, after observing the scene for a whole year, I noticed that very few gourmet novels were actually successful, except for those by a handful of top authors. Books from new accounts almost never made a splash.

So I decided to try writing power-fantasy novels again. The result was just one flop after another. I flopped so hard I couldn’t even get a contract. When I finally did get one and the book went premium, I was only making the 1,500 yuan attendance bonus plus a few extra yuan. Literally, just a few yuan. I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I got lucky. During this slump, I was picked up by my editor, Milk Tent, and I switched over to Group 9. When I sent Milk Tent my new book’s opening, he said it was too cliché. He looked at my old books, then tossed a spreadsheet at me filled with successful books that had a more international style and gave me all sorts of suggestions for reference. That got me thinking. When I was studying and working abroad, I used to love the show *Law of the Jungle* with Jin Bingwan. I always looked forward to watching them hunt, build shelters, and go diving for fish. At the end, they’d gather around a campfire to share delicious things like lobster and coconut crabs. I also remembered seeing a foreign wilderness show where they invited a hunter and a chef to compete as a team. The chef ended up either burning the food or leaving it raw, a complete waste of ingredients. A lightbulb went off. What if I used that as my starting point? Personally finding ingredients in the wild and cooking them. That should be more interesting to read than a traditional gourmet novel.

When I started writing this book, I honestly didn’t have high expectations. I was just hoping to make four or five thousand yuan a month. I never expected the stats to keep climbing. It peaked at number two on the Urban New Book chart and number eight on the overall chart. It even got on the New Author Strong Recommendation and Sanjiang lists. I guess you could say I’ve unlocked a milestone in my life as a flop author. For that, I want to thank all of you esteemed readers who enjoy this book.

As for what’s next, after discussing it with Milk Tent, we’ve decided to stick to the main plot for the foreseeable future: wilderness exploration and gourmet cooking. After the Alaska arc is finished, I’ll switch to a completely different environment. A new setting will mean different survival methods and ingredients, which will create new points of interest. Rushing to write about something else would definitely ruin the story. As I mentioned in the synopsis, outside of the main plot, it will mostly be some farming, cooking, and interacting with foreigners. There won’t be any major, dramatic highs and lows; it’s all slice-of-life. The nature of slice-of-life stories is that they can get boring if you read too much of them. That’s just how it is.

I didn’t realize I’d written so much. I should get back to writing. Finally, thank you all again for your support, my esteemed readers. I hope to continue on this journey with your companionship. I wish you all good health and good fortune in the coming new year, and most importantly, may you all get rich!

Oh, right, one more thing. I want to thank another gourmet fiction author, Peaceful Haihe River. I met him in a group chat while I was writing my last book. He started his book after mine, but his stats were better. I felt like he was a more talented writer than me. And sure enough, when I was browsing the Sanjiang list at the start of this book, I saw his name. He had quietly launched a book called *Gourmet Intelligence King* and had already made it through the "Small Trumpet," New Author Strong Rec, and Sanjiang lists. We had agreed to do Chapter-for-Chapter promotions, but just two days after he promoted my book, he dropped his own. When we chatted, he said that writing every day felt like being in prison. Only authors of slice-of-life stories can understand that pain. The genre is so important. At least with my current direction, there’s still a lot I can write about. I hope his next book goes better. After all, very few authors manage to persevere through their rookie period.