What began as a paranormal romance posted by a 14-year-old on Wattpad will now act as the writer’s traditional publishing debut a decade later. Wattpad is publishing Alicia Wallace’s updated novel Bite Me and Love Bites: Volume 1, a graphic novel adaptation, both hitting shelves on August 4.

Originally written when Wallace was in middle school, Bite Me follows high school student and vampire Kieran who struggles with his conflicting distaste and desire for new classmate Mason. But when Mason reveals that he is a werewolf, the war between the two supernatural species threatens to upend their budding relationship.

As a teen, Wallace was drawn to Wattpad, a writing platform that gained popularity for its fan-fiction stories, because she’d seen many of her peers showing interest in it. Soon she veered off the path of stories recommended by friends, and embarked on her own journey into the weeds of Wattpad, discovering a catalogue of queer stories that piqued her passion for storytelling. The platform had given her a portal to explore her creative potential as a writer in a place that felt safe among LGBTQ+ community.

“Wattpad was a space where I could dip my toe in and be surrounded by other queer people, [and] interact without having to fully commit myself yet,” Wallace said. “I could just explore that space through reading and writing. It was very dear to me at that age.”

In 2020, Wattpad started a publishing division to produce print books based on the stories on its online platform. Wallace had been posting her own works there, but becoming a traditionally published writer hadn’t been the plan. Even as her web stories grew more popular, she remembers thinking that she would never write for money “because then I’m going to lose my love for it.” Then, while she was studying microbiology in college, Wattpad approached Wallace about publishing Bite Me as a print book. She originally turned down the offer.

“I didn’t see myself in a space where I could commit to revamping the book the way I thought I would need to,” Wallace said of her initial decision. “I wrote it when I was 14 or 15. If I was going to publish it, I wanted it to be a book that reads like it could be on shelves.”

But years later, the rush of writing a story still hadn’t left Wallace, and when Wattpad returned with another offer, Wallace accepted. This time around, “I really felt like I had the tools. Writing was my calling always,” Wallace said. “I had just taken a pit stop. I felt emboldened to take on this project and try to make something more out of what [I wrote] originally.”

The first new iteration of the story arrived on Webtoon, the popular anime and manga site. Love Bites was a seven-episode comic that released last year with an adaptation by Ele and art by Anzaitea. The series has garnered 111 million views since its release and earned 1.4 million subscribers.

The graphic novel edition of Love Bites was a particularly exciting venture for Wallace, who said she “always wished I could draw for this exact reason.” Love Bites, the Webtoon, had already been in production while Wallace was in the process of rewriting Bite Me.

The Webtoon team made various creative changes, “from new characters to different characterizations to reconfigurations of the lore,” Wallace said. “These books sprouted from the same seed—the original Wattpad story—but each has its own branches.”

Crafting the updated novel also offered Wallace the chance to take risks and make adjustments that her younger self hadn’t had the foresight to make. She no longer merely wanted “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” which at the time was just to see two boys kissing. The writer said she is now interested in character development, seeing Kieran and Mason as more than tools for love and drama. The revision process helped her strike a balance between her younger desires and adult sensibilities.

“There was this tension as I was writing between trying to bring in the maturity and the life lessons that I have taken in,” Wallace said. “But I feel like there are times when I also had to listen to my 14-year-old self.”

Looking back, Wallace has compassion for that teenager who sat down at her computer daring to tell her own kind of story. Evolving alongside her characters has given her the chance to return to something she once loved.

“You just have to read it again, and it brings you right back to where you were,” Wallace said of revisiting her story. “And you remember these characters and your intentions for them—[ones] that you didn’t think that you still had.”