These days, who still reads the acknowledgments on a bookshelf?

Taozi is social anxiety personified, rarely speaking to anyone except when catching cicadas, but always keen to communicate with everyone through writing, sharing the emotional journey within.

For starters, Taozi's life isn't great, but it's not miserable either, just normal.

So we're not going to play the pity card here.

Originally, this book had a different beginning—I had written forty thousand carefully crafted words.

But as the publishing date approached, Taozi kept feeling the writing wasn't good enough, so in the end I scrapped it all and wrote the current opening, which doesn't seem to be much better than before either.

When the book first launched, the loyal readers came out in force to support, leading to quite nice data growth early on.

Grateful for the old readers.