Emma asked Weina Dai Randel:

A book takes a long time to write a book and for me sometimes i try but i get ahead of myself. How do you keep a steady pace but still keep writing a fantastic book?

Weina Dai Randel Maybe because I don't watch TV? :)

Seriously, I have to confess that if I had known it would take me ten year to write and publish a book from the very beginning, I would not have started to write at all.

What happened to me was like this: I had a scene in my head so I wrote for a few months and produced fifty or sixty pages. Then I turned to read other authors' books, and then I went back to read my own pages -- they were horrific, to be frank. So I decided to write another scene, repeated the same process.

I finished the first draft in six years, printed it out, and realized most scenes didn't make sense to the story at all: for example, I had 120 pages of Mei travelling to Chang'an, attacked by bandits on the road, and then living under her half-brother's roof and trying to make ends meet by selling herbs in the Western Market, but because the story tells Mei's life in the palace, I had to cut out all the 120 pages, which took me 2 years to write.

Having a routine definitely helped me fixated on writing, knowing that my manuscript needed to be improved was also encouraging, and then of course, the feedback from agents also offered a gleam of hope.

I hope my answer will offer something helpful to you, Emma. Thank you for reading my novel!

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