Bestseller Author Celebrates Her Ten-Year Career

On September 24， 2011， a ceremony was held at Hangzhou Library in celebration of the ten-year career of Cang Yue (her pen name)， a genre writer based in Hangzhou. Cang Yue is a woman writer famed for her kongfu fantasies over the past ten years. The lecture hall that can seat 350 people was full. There were many standing in the back.

Cang Yue chose to hold a gathering with her readers in celebration of the big moment. She thinks her biggest gain of the career is a large loyal following. Among the audience were some people who had just heard of her and planned to read her books.

Those who read her books know where Cang Yue stands in the world of kongfu fantasies: she is indisputably number one. Her readers know who she is in the real world: with a master’s degree in architecture from Zhejiang University， she works for a construction company and she writes at home in her spare time. For the last decade， she has published more than ten books. The total copies amount to over 1 million. She was inspired by Jin Yong and Gu Long， the Big Two Writers of Chinese kongfu novels of the 20th century. She was dissatisfied with the women characters in the books by the two male master novelists. Her heroines are different. They are as colorful as the heroes. Her novels combine fantasy and romance. She never dreams of stepping into serious literature and never loves those highly literary books. She claims she does not understand stream of consciousness. What she loves are books with good storylines.

Though Cang Yue confines herself to writing kongfu fantasies and is contented with the genre， she reads a great deal beyond kongfu novels. On the top of her reading list are legends of the Ming and Qing dynasties and masterpieces on women by British women writers. When she has difficulty starting a novel， she does not start from beginning. She writes the climax first. When she was writing “Snow of Seven Nights，” all she desired to produce was the scene in which the heroin and the heroine sat under a blooming plum blossom tree and drinking and the scene in which they failed to meet each other in the snow-covered wilderness. She wrote the whole story just for these two scenes.

Hangzhou boasts a number of genre writers of national renown. All of them made their literary debut on the internet. Among them are South-Style Third Uncle (Cultural Dialogue ran a story on the horror writer in the June issue of 2010)， the Third Son of the Cao Family， and Lu Qi.

Third Uncle， a writer born in 1982 and no uncle to anyone in real life， writes horror stories. He has published seven “Grave Robber’s Notes” so far and sold a few million copies. He is now writing the finale to wrap up the robber’s horrifying adventures.

Third Son of the Cao Family is the penname of Cao Shen. A graduate of machinery from Zhejiang University， he made his name at an internet forum by publishing his first novel there. A wonderful storyteller， he has produced three bestsellers， each of which sold more than 100，000 copies. His modernist narrative of historical figures attracts readers.

Lu Qi made his literary debut online in September 2009 and his first book was called “Stay Undercover in Office，” a book on office politics. He wrote a sequence to the first book and produced another about office politics. Now Lu Qi has left office politics behind thinking it is losing attraction as a genre. Now he writes for women readers with difficulty getting married.

Xia Lie， director of Zhejiang Genre Literature Committee， attended the ceremony at the lecture hall of Hangzhou Library. An expert of genre literature， Xia said native genre writers of Hangzhou play a big part in China’s genre literature. The Zhejiang Writers Association pays attention to these outstanding young writers of Hangzhou in evaluating genre writers， for the association believes that these genre writers will be playing a much bigger role in China’s literature in the future.