Thinking of You Drives Me Mad

My new novel, Beyond Reach, is opening soon. Please add me to your author collection!

[1]

In high school, Ye Zhizhi loves walking to school. The journey takes nearly an hour and wears her out, but she does it gladly.

Whenever anyone asks why she doesn't take a bus, she smiles and says she likes the scenery along the way.

Only she knows that it's not the scenery that makes her cherish that route, but the boy who appears there every day, always on time to buy candy. The boy named Jiang Ni.

One is a celebrated dance prodigy, the other a rebellious delinquent who never studies. They are like parallel lines, so far apart that neither expects their lives to intersect.

Perhaps that walk is the only connection they will ever have.

No one knows that the road she walks each morning holds Ye Zhizhi's secret feelings, as well as the boy's cautious tenderness.

[2]

Years later, on their wedding night, Ye Zhizhi rests in her husband's arms and tells him about her clumsy teenage crush. She blames him for being so slow on the uptake and wasting all the effort she put in back then.

Jiang Ni chuckles.

In the dark, Ye Zhizhi feels his chest tremble with amusement. Thinking he's laughing at her, she feels hurt and resentful.

The man brushes the hair from her forehead and gives her a tender kiss. "In high school, I left home two hours early every day so I could take the same route as the girl I liked. I pretended to buy candy there and waited for her, rain or shine."

Ye Zhizhi is stunned. Thinking back on everything, it feels like a dream.

[3]

Ye Zhizhi began learning dance at six, joined the National Song and Dance Ensemble at eighteen, and became its principal dancer at twenty-one. She won countless awards and became one of the most outstanding talents in Chinese dance.

For the first twenty-four years of her life, everything went her way. She rose higher with every passing year.

Then, at twenty-four, she went blind.

In just one year, Ye Zhizhi fell from the heavens into an endless hell.

Everyone loved her, but no one could save her.

She struggled out of her shattered honey jar, battered and exhausted, and tasted every kind of hardship.

Then Jiang Ni appeared and placed a piece of candy in her palm.

Hot-tempered, proud young lady x gentle, suave housekeeper

[In the endless darkness, you are the only light I can touch.]

Reader's Guide:

1. Partly set in the entertainment industry, but there aren't many showbiz elements.

2. A reunion after years apart, with both leads saving each other.

3. Her sight will return. Happy ending.

-- Blurb for the upcoming novel Beyond Reach --

[1]

As a teenager, Lin Chaolu has a secret: she's fallen for the most distant star in the sky.

Seventeen-year-old Meng Fanchen is a privileged, noble young man, the very definition of excellence.

On the eve of her high school graduation, just before Lin Chaolu can confess her feelings, she's told that a talent scout has discovered him and he's joined the entertainment industry to act.

Lin Chaolu's secret crush, like her old diary, is forgotten in a dusty corner.

She watches his career shine, watches him grow ever more unreachable.

The day Meng Fanchen's relationship is revealed, Lin Chaolu finds her old high school diary in a corner of the house.

One page holds the secret feelings of her youth:

"I spent my entire youth trying to chase that unreachable star.

Then, overnight, I became just one of the countless people standing behind him."

[2]

Lin Chaolu never dreamed that Meng Fanchen would star in the screenplay she wrote.

She's thrilled, but also agonizes every day over how to keep him from discovering that the story is based on her high school crush.

And that the male lead is none other than Meng Fanchen himself.

But Meng Fanchen keeps hounding her every day, wanting to discuss the story in depth and analyze the heroine's emotional journey as she falls in love.

Lin Chaolu is cautious and nervous, terrified she'll give herself away.

On the last day of the script read-through, Lin Chaolu finally breathes a sigh of relief, only to receive a message from Meng Fanchen.

"Ms. Lin, I have one last question."

"I've been this obvious. Why hasn't the heroine figured out that I'm in love with her?"

[I never thought the star beyond my reach would one day truly fly to me.]

Theme: Someone will come along and lead you out of the darkness.