(I'm writing this on about three hours of sleep, so coherency might suffer.)
Most of my reading here has been giving feedback on first chapters to people off the Discord et al. That said, there was one novel where the writing was so damned good my jaw hit the proverbial floor, and it was this by @mabelem :
Now onto mine...
So, my book is a spiritual sequel to Re:Creators, which is a 2017 anime series on Amazon about fictional characters coming into the real world, meeting their creators, and having battles. It was Rei Hiroe's exploration of his media landscape on both the story and creative sides, and It got deep under my skin, particularly this quote in the second-last episode:
"Passion and despair... Bad wishes and good wishes... They were all contained in that moment. And then the story... takes root in someone's heart... and changes that person's world."
And I realized that I had never really written a story like that...and I really wanted to.
What made me write such a story as a spiritual sequel to the show was my brain, which started plotting an actual sequel to the anime despite all of my best efforts to stop it (when you've been published by two major publishing houses, own your own publishing company, and write and edit at a professional level, you're NOT supposed to be writing fanfiction...and if you do publish fanfiction, you can expect to receive a tap on the shoulder from somebody's lawyer). Eventually I gave in and wrote it as a stealth pitch ("if I was going to write a sequel to Re:Creators, here is what I would do and why), put it up on Medium (for those who are curious, no point in looking for it - I removed it as soon as Re:Apotheosis went live), and thought that my brain would be satisfied and stop.
My brain is a stubborn bastard - it kept writing scenes in my head anyway. Happily, it also figured out how to change the cosmology into something original that was also at least as good, which made it possible to turn it into a spiritual sequel.
I queried the Re:Creators subreddit to see if there would be interest in reading my stealth pitch turned into a proper original novel, and the answer came out as a resounding "yes!" So, I started writing.
As for why it is on Tapas, I figured that it would be the right place to rebuild my fiction career. The thing about being a fantasy author around 2000 (which is when I got the contract from Pocket Books to write Diablo: Demonsbane), was that there was this little trilogy of movies called The Lord of the Rings that came out around the same time. It was a huge success, and the fantasy publishers glutted themselves. If you were on the right side of the glut, you got in. If you were on the wrong side of the glut, response times went from months to years...for agented submissions. I was having agent troubles at the time, and I missed the window. I eventually gave up on the main fantasy publishers when I found myself wanting to ask my agent at the time how many decades I would have to wait for a response.
Rejections don't kill a fiction writing career - submitting manuscripts is a numbers game, and a rejection letter just means that you or your agent can move on to the next one. Being left in limbo for years, THAT kills a fiction writing career. With the exception of The Eternity Quartet, a few years back, which I collaborated on with my friend Ed Greenwood and published through my own company, and couple of short stories here and there, my fiction career was dead in the water. Being a private person with little social media presence didn't help either. So, I wanted people to actually read this thing I was being compelled by my brain to write, and I figured that if I was going to try to rebuild an audience in the 21st century, this was a good place to try.
So, hopefully people will read it, like it, and decide that they'd like to own copy in print (which is happening through my publishing company)...and then that they want to read the next book, and the next (which, as of book 3, will have no serialized content).
And here's the link to mine: