Ever since my novel "Luminous" first shot up to #1 on Fantasy and Adventure in mid-July (Actually, see my hysterical Facebook boast-rant below for tangible proof XD), I've been getting a number of PMs and comments asking how I've managed to achieve this.
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The honest answer is: I DON'T KNOW.
And that's why I wrote this essay. So you and I can both make sense of it together, and hopefully get some takeaways, or at least some closure.
So, here's what happened:
Of course I've dreamt of something like this happening (who hasn't, once they've mustered up the courage to hit Publish on their first ever Wattpad story?), but that was, hmm...over a decade ago?
I know the despair, the depression, and the loneliness of writing only for yourself well. I've been writing Thai fanfiction for the slow-dying fandom of a Thai novel for many, many years. Sacrificing 20/20 eyesight, the lack of constant neck pain, friendship and social life, and being a normal, balanced teen, in favor of long hours before my laptop, constantly being tortured by jealousy of those bubbly fan-servicing or smut-heavy YAOI fanfics with a gazillion views and raving fans. It's like I'm a masochist.
Unable to stand my bitter rants any longer, as we were waiting for the train one day, my good ol' twin brother poured a bucket of ice-cold hard truth over my head, telling me bluntly that I should just move on. He suggested I ditch my doomed fanfiction trilogy of ten years, and write that original English novel I've had languishing in my brain for half that time.
After lots of denial and tears and screaming at my poor rational engineer brother for rubbing salt on my wound, I finally admitted he was wise, bid goodbye to my beloved fanfiction, and dusted off the abandoned story that would later become Luminous.
Around February 2020, I started overhauling the plot, the characters, the early chapters, the title, the blurb...basically, everything except the names of the protagonists.
Pretending to gloss over the sheer amount of werewolf romance there, I posted my entirely werewolf-free story on Inkitt, and did review swaps for a while (didn't actually work...too exhausting, plus, everyone was just as much an amateur as me).
I also posted the first chapters on CritiqueCircle, and invited them critters to tear me apart (which they did...at times to very nitpicky pieces. For example, my dragon couldn't be described as having razor-sharp teeth because it's "cliched"...But some awesome critters did give very useful advice and feedback!)
For a while, I considered posting (and sometimes did posted) my story on every writing platform I could find, from Tablo to FictionPress, before I finally came to the depressing conclusion that none had the scale, the organization, the opportunities, and the currently active reader base of Wattpad.
