Wenhao 1979, starting with contributing to Story Club

Chapter 1 Submitted Story Collection

The editorial department of the Shanghai-based "Story Club" magazine in 1979.

The Spring Festival holiday has just ended and the Lantern Festival is not yet here, but the editorial department is already extremely busy.

As a newly hired trainee editor, Wu Ke's most important and tedious task every day is to open letters, sort and register author submissions, prioritize the manuscripts of some veteran authors in the industry, and then present them to several different senior editors.

Before the Lunar New Year, she didn't have many opportunities to participate in the initial review process for submissions.

However, after the Spring Festival holiday, the situation changed drastically, with submissions pouring in from all over the country.

"Hmm, this envelope is unusually thick."

The submission requirements for Story Club are generally short stories under 10,000 words, with a fast pace and easy-to-understand content. The literary requirements are not that high, but the key point is that the story must be exciting and make readers want to read it in one go.

The reading threshold should not be too highbrow or sophisticated.

Therefore, even if an author submits three or five articles at the same time, the envelope is usually not very thick.

But the brown paper bag of letters she was holding was noticeably two or even three times thicker than a normal letter.

If this room is full of manuscripts submitted by authors...

She estimated that it would have to be at least a medium-length novel of over 200,000 words.

The total word count of a single issue of "Story Club" is only around 100,000 words.

Tsk tsk.

Perhaps the author submitted it to the wrong platform.

With that thought in mind, she still registered the submission address and mailing date, then quickly tore open the envelope, suppressed her curiosity, and took out the manuscript inside.

"Hmm, you do have beautiful handwriting!"

"Huh, they actually compiled their own catalog of works..."

The moment Wu Ke received the manuscript, she was immediately impressed with the author.

After all, the fact that the author handled the details of the letter so well, making it easy for the editor to read and review it, highlights that the author is meticulous and conscientious in doing things, and is a self-disciplined and considerate person who is also willing to make things convenient for others.

After a quick glance at the catalog of works, Wu Ke couldn't help but exclaim in surprise.

The editor Bao Fang, sitting opposite her, glanced over and asked, "What's wrong, Xiao Wu? Why are you suddenly shouting like that?"

"This author submitted 25 works at once."

"Heh, then there's no need to waste any more time flipping through it. He's definitely some frivolous writer who's gone crazy trying to make money by writing. He's treating our *Story Collection* like a dumping ground. Since he can't publish in other journals, he just dumps all his churned-up literary garbage here, hoping we can find some gold in the trash and at least pick one or two pieces. With this kind of creative attitude, it's best not to use any barely usable manuscripts, otherwise you'll only keep receiving more and more literary garbage in the future..."

Wu Ke was stunned by the experienced advice of the veteran editor Bao Fang.

She opened her mouth to explain, but Editor Bao had already lowered his head and was concentrating on reviewing the manuscript again.

at the same time.

In a rural area of ​​Northwest China, thousands of miles away, lies a dilapidated farmhouse with a breached earthen wall.

A sickly young man was sweeping the snow in the yard.

Heavy snow has fallen in the Northwest. The heavy snow started before the Spring Festival and continued for a couple of days during the holiday. Now, with the Lantern Festival approaching, the heavy snow has started falling again.

The young man, named Yu Zhen, was sweeping snow while muttering to himself.

In short, he had always dreamed of experiencing the feeling of snow falling like goose feathers in winter, but now, having lived two lives, he was truly fed up with the feeling of being covered in snow and ice.

All he wanted was to face the sea, where spring is warm and flowers bloom.

Last winter, quite strangely, he, from another timeline, didn't actually have any extraordinary luck. He simply wanted to experience firsthand what it was like to see the snow-covered landscape of the North in winter, so he joined a tour group and came to the North to ski on a natural ice rink. He was skiing so fast that he seemed to plunge headfirst into a snowdrift and be completely buried.

He was revived by a flurry of activity.

They were then told that they were in a rural area in Northwest China, and time and space suddenly seemed to have transported them to 1978.

The villagers rescued him, but because he lacked identification and his origins were unknown, the matter was quickly reported to the commune. The police station sent officers to investigate and question him thoroughly, but they couldn't find out anything. They could only temporarily place him in this nearly abandoned educated youth resettlement site.

The college entrance examination was reinstated in the winter of 77, and the policy on educated youth returning to the city was greatly relaxed in 78.

Therefore, by the winter of that year, every educated youth with connections used their unique abilities to return to the city.

The villagers thought he was a pitiful man who had nowhere to go back to the city and couldn't think straight, so he committed suicide.

After settling him in, the village scraped together a lot of basic living supplies and sent them to him, enough for him to survive.

Faced with such a predicament, what else can Yu Zhen do?

He can't just stay trapped in the rural Northwest for the rest of his life, transforming himself into a rural old man toiling in the fields from dawn till dusk!

Besides, what does he know about farming? Being able to distinguish between wheat seedlings and chives is already the most basic agricultural knowledge he's gained from the internet.

Moreover, he was suddenly transported into the body of an unregistered person with no identity or background.

The fact that he wasn't taken away as a spy by the police from the commune was the maximum protection he could achieve by pretending to be an amnesiac educated youth.

In an era where without official introductions, even those with money in their pockets could hardly travel freely across the country, his only option was to endure the hardship and settle down peacefully in the semi-abandoned youth settlement.

Of course, he also believed in the saying that when you're out in the world, you give yourself your identity.

It's obviously unreliable to passively wait for the police to find out his identity.

So, as soon as he settled down, he began to do everything he could to engage in literary creation, hoping that one day he could obtain the necessary travel documents by claiming that he had been seconded to a magazine to revise his manuscript, and then go to a city where it would be easier to survive, and then slowly plan for a brighter future.

Clearly, Yu Zhen overestimated his creative abilities.

Even though I've read many famous literary works, such as "Ordinary World," "Life," "White Deer Plain," and "To Live," I can still vaguely recall most of these masterpieces and tell people about them.

But when they actually tried to recreate it in words, they were dumbfounded.

In the end, I could only write a few hundred thousand words of online novels in my previous life. I can't say that I had no writing ability at all, but the gap between me and the works of famous authors with extremely profound literary qualities is something that cannot be fully made up for by the memories of my past life.

That winter, my modern poetry was published smoothly, with three or five poems published. I earned a considerable amount of royalties, which I used to give back to the villagers. This earned me a well-known reputation as a poet and writer both inside and outside the village.

However, plagiarizing modern poems won't earn you the opportunity to be seconded or edited by journals and magazines.

It does not offer much benefit in changing the status quo.

Out of desperation, I tried lowering my standards and adapting some of the films and television shows I had seen in my previous life into novels. After several attempts, I did regain some confidence.

So, during the entire winter at the educated youth settlement, Mao wrote tirelessly whenever he had free time. Before he knew it, his ability to adapt and rewrite stories became more and more refined. He had read at least a few of his stories to the villagers, who praised them highly. They all said that his stories were ten thousand times more exciting than those in "Story Club".

Yu Zhen wasn't qualified to choose a journal platform, so he thought he would submit all the manuscripts he had accumulated over the winter to "Story Club" in one go. Would the editorial department be interested in him and become curious about this rural writer, and give him a chance to be seconded for "editing"?

After all, he knew very well that "Story Club," which had just resumed publication in January 1979, would be the fastest-growing and first platform to break the million-copy sales mark among all domestic periodicals and magazines, in terms of circulation alone.

Due to the extreme need for manuscripts, the Story Magazine contacted a group of industry experts this summer to hold a creative salon in Shanghai. It was somewhat like a professional creative studio, where a group of writers were confined to a place and "whipped" to urge them to submit their manuscripts every day.

This creative salon is exactly what he's looking for right now.