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Drawing on a 4-year multi-sited digital ethnography (2021\u20132025) and interviews with 34 writers on Jinjiang Literature City alongside sustained forum observation and platform-discourse analysis, this article tracks how authors of serial romance work under the time discipline of the daily-update treadmill in the presence of large language models (LLMs). I argue that what is emerging is sympoietic creativity: a distributed practice of \u201cmaking-with\u201d the machine that is fraught, ambivalent and strategic rather than collaborative or replacement-driven. Four modes of negotiation co-exist across the cohort. In\n                    <jats:italic>strategic collaboration<\/jats:italic>\n                    , writers delegate world-building, naming and structural error-checking to the LLM. In\n                    <jats:italic>cyborg authorship<\/jats:italic>\n                    , they curate machine-generated prose under acute platform pressure, at the cost of what they themselves call the work\u2019s \u201caura.\u201d In\n                    <jats:italic>conditional refusal<\/jats:italic>\n                    , they hold the line at the inter-subjective texture of feeling they consider, on present evidence, beyond the model\u2019s competence. In\n                    <jats:italic>narrative incorporation<\/jats:italic>\n                    , they thematize algorithmic logic in the fiction itself, casting the algorithmic system as villain and human emotion as the route to victory. Throughout, I reserve\n                    <jats:italic>qing<\/jats:italic>\n                    \u2014the inter-subjective, somatic bond from which affect, desire, and embodiment become legible to the reader\u2014as a precise analytical term distinct from generic English-language emotion or affect. The human zone these writers preserve is not a permanent or guaranteed space, but an unstable equilibrium sustained by reader vigilance, platform metrics, and writer self-discipline\u2014any of which could withdraw.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s00146-026-03253-w","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,24]],"date-time":"2026-07-24T14:13:41Z","timestamp":1784902421000},"page":"9309-9320","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Sympoietic creativity and the boundaries of qing: digital romance writers negotiating generative AI"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"41","author":[{"given":"Liang","family":"Ge","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"3253_CR1","volume-title":"The cultural politics of emotion","author":"S Ahmed","year":"2004","unstructured":"Ahmed S (2004) The cultural politics of emotion. 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