Share how you came up with your story and promote!

ScribbleJay 2024-01-16 21:08:00 UTC #6

What a cool idea for a topic! It’s fun seeing how the initial seeds of an idea grew over time.
I just posted a new comic inspired by a long, rainy drive. I was thinking about Bambi (the book). It follows Bambi as he grows older and slowly becomes more wise and more distant from the smaller woodland creatures around him, until he can barely relate to them anymore — he eventually grows so wise that he discovers God(!).
I’d just come back from the T.Rex Discovery Center in Eastend, so I had dinosaurs on the brain. I thought, if the experience of an adult deer is so alien from that of a baby deer, imagine the difference between, say, a +80 ton sauropod and its 8 pound hatchling.
And yes, it’s also inspired by Land Before Time and the Lion King, which are in turn inspired by Bambi, so I guess it all comes back to the same talking deer story.

Animal508 2024-01-16 21:22:50 UTC #7

I looked at isekais such as spider and slime, and disliked that their protagonists became overpowered. I wanted to come up with a situation where it was impossible for the protagonist to become overpowered, where he would be the underdog in every possible scenario, and so:

PenguinAngel 2024-01-16 21:46:50 UTC #8

I just.....came out at some point...and i was fed up with a toxic friend of mine (ex)

linZcomics 2024-01-16 22:03:46 UTC #9

My comic started off as a video game comic with one off jokes. It mainly focused on RPG and MMO elements.

However, the characters naturally started to evolve. As they evolved, I wanted to work on a more serious story. From there it just kind of happened.

sams_cartoon_shack 2024-01-16 22:12:05 UTC #10

The idea for a comic about talking shapes came from this Australian CGI cartoon I watched a child called The Shapies which was about these geometric shapes trying to be the best band in the world. However, most of my influences came from newspaper comic strips like Garfield, Peanuts, Dilbert, and, most importantly, Pearls Before Swine. I would draw these little comics on sheets of paper throughout my teen years before ultimately deciding 3 years ago to redraw these strips so I could start actually publishing them.

llobucervallince 2024-01-16 22:14:07 UTC #11

LostKelp 2024-01-16 22:28:17 UTC #12

Originally najm and alya were random kids that were gonna be adopted by a badass space mercenary lady - think Boba fett/Hans solo if they were a buff old lady with a starwars fixation, like in universe she wants to emulate them. So she's also a Nerd.

So in this post apocalypse these two kids crash land their spaceship onto this mercenary's land and she brings them back to an old space port to send them back. But then I thought well where are they going back to? Maybe they crash landed on purpose? Maybe things aren't so hot in space?

I turned my focus to their backstory maybe a corporate overlord Elon musk style crossed with stormtrooper aesthetics? Well then the story couldn't be about sending them back into corporate hell, so my beautiful Boba fett lady got put on the shelf, and the story became about Najm alya and their crew mates Qam and Rahat persevering through corporate hell and finding a way out and even a way to bring them all down.

So check it out! It's a hell of a ride.

(Also in spite of all the inspiration, I don't really like starwars. 'S fine, my mom likes it plenty so the imagery might have seeped in that way)

willmarstudios 2024-01-16 22:30:37 UTC #13

What a fun idea to help promote and share our work! Thank you for this opportunity

NULLED has a very long history of revisions, AU's and ideations spanning back to almost middle school for me. The MC, Conri, was never really a solidified character because I was just doodling one day, but then he just stuck around and I'm glad he did! The basic premise/plot stemmed from an old RP plot that was I want to say maybe 2 - 3 years in the making. Very rough, very trope heavy and just a combination of insane plot lines: it was very fun!

Then my close friend (starlitswords on twitter) told me that she was in the process of writing a trilogy series that she hoped to get published one day as she went through school (its very much in the editing/revision stages). Her story is so vivid and absolutely wonderful from what I've read and one day she approached me and asked if she could include Conri as a side character to which I was absolutely honored! I said yes obviously!

From then on as I was included in her writing/drafting process, we went through ideas of how to include him and that collaboration inspired me to really want to flush out his backstory. Hence why NULLED now exists lol

Thanks for reading and I hope you'll enjoy this queer modern fantasy:

MK_Wizard 2024-01-16 22:55:32 UTC #14

Psychoborg started off as a "what if" fanfiction scenario that I felt could have been a great opportunity if He-Man the 2002 remake went that way. However, it began to deviate so much from the source material that it was not He-Man anymore and it was better for that because I was still left with a great story.

Psychoborg is the result of twenty years worth of imagination, heart and work. It is an action fantasy inspired by the 80s and it rated M.

NetherSlayer 2024-01-16 23:38:32 UTC #15

I came up with my story over a decade ago when I was playing the MMORPG Spiral Knights basically every day. Over the course of 5 years, I sunk one thousand hours into it, and I was always hoping that the game would receive more love and development, but it just... never did. Sure an update here and there, but not like most other MMORPGs, and the biggest gripe I had was the barebones story, when the game had everything to make a massive, sprawling, expansive and immersive world. Maybe that was never the intended goal for it, but I definitely dreamed big for its sake.

Fast forward a few years and I began writing a novelized version of the series of events that unfold in the game, but giving it that attention to detail and thorough explanation that the game sorely lacked. Characters are based on NPCs or players I encountered, convenient game mechanics are explained as why the world works the way it does, and the missions aren't just levels with enemies scattered about to fight with an occasional dialogue sequence, but compelling and designed to move the story forward.

And, while I'm writing a bit out of order, here it is! Weekly episodes should resume shortly.

GunmetalSkies 2024-01-17 00:33:11 UTC #16

I also started my novel from the True Love competition on here after a friend showed it to me! I have a variety of story ideas in play already, but I wanted to do something new for the competition, and I knew I wanted it to be fantasy-based. Eventually, I decided I wanted to play around with the idea of blood knights, which led me to create Fia. Opposing him, I ended up with Eli as our resident world-traveling thief. And since I hadn't yet written a fantasy story that involved dragons, I decided I needed to work that into it as well.

This was a very fast-paced creation process, given the time frame of the competition and the fact that I wasn't starting right at the beginning of it. There was a lot of world-building along the way, but I eventually settled on the state of the world with the empire and what the conflict would be in various places throughout the world and story. Part of this, because of the nature of the competition, settled around the romance between Fia and Eli, or what would eventually be their romance. That part became a bit of a play on the prince needing rescue, only our prince happens to be a knight who is also quite capable of killing a dragon on his own, so rather than the traditional fairy tale story of princess-knight-dragon, we've got a blood knight, thief, and empire!

The magic system and how the shadows actually worked took a little more time to play with. But I really love the idea of in-between places and other worlds, so this gave me a chance to introduce that concept into the story as well through the magic itself. Plus, lots of fun new creatures! I've always been a sucker for good bonds between characters and animal companions

I also knew I really wanted a story where I could play on the whole idea of "all that glitters is not gold" with characters who aren't wholly good or bad, and ultimately how love kinda saves us from the worst of ourselves. And from that, I created Dance of Blood and Faith!

skidiggy 2024-01-17 03:15:11 UTC #17

I started working on ideas for Apparent Secrets about ten years ago to distract myself during the day during downtime at my 9-to-5, which eventually morphed into the story as it is today. Major progress was made for the True Love on Tapas contest, and I've been writing every day on it ever since.

menthol.crayon 2024-01-17 04:26:23 UTC #18

I wanted to rebel against my catholic upbringing by making angels and demons fall in love <3 https://tapas.io/series/Horns-and-Halos

LadyWarrior 2024-01-17 09:17:21 UTC #19

Hello! I want to promote this story. This story was written way back 2012. I was highschool back then when I wrote this and I just make a new plot but same name. I didn't like what I wrote back then because it was so long, confusing and kinda boring since I am not mature. So, I write again the Vampires Game with different plot and twist. I came up with this idea because of dreams. Actually, I have dream about this castle in the party where the protagonist seat, observing the people then, the next thing in my dream was, she was jumping high on the rooftop to the other side and was chased by these vampires. Later on, I am thinking about writing this and then I make a scenes in my mind, I stitch it one by one in order to create a novel. Added to it, is inspired by love, family and friendship.

rosskinnaird 2024-01-17 13:42:17 UTC #20

I'm a LGBTQIA+ writer and author of the Power of Love Series.
While the main High Fantasy Trilogy is available in a traditional format (2 out of 3 novels are available worldwide), the one I write here, The Power of Love: A Tale of Time, it's a prequel to the main story.

I came up with this latest novel mainly because I had so much to tell still that I wanted to write about all the things I had to cut from the first novel. Being a Portal Fantasy, my first, debut novel had a lot of world and magic system building but I couldn't keep the entire backstory. So, I decided to spin this off as a webserial.

The main idea is to eventually publish it as a full novel, but for now, the story in here is almost complete!! Only few chapters away from the end!

2DLenzy 2024-01-17 14:35:08 UTC #21

Gal with suburban upbringing. Knew nothing about chickens. Confused "fryers" with "friars" a few years ago, which inspired the title/pun and an initial gag-comedy pitch. Then I reworked it all to involve darker themes, hierarchies, two-sided stories with dramatic flair, and some fact-dumping about chickens, but told in an entertaining sort of way.

The assumed offspring of Don Bluth, Monty Python, Chicken Run, and soon Game of Thrones. Oh, and there's mythology/religion references mixed in there as well.

[Dramedy, Chickens, Cults?, Consumerism, Orders, Fryers, Family, Belonging]

miyaskya 2024-01-17 19:36:29 UTC #22

Grand Epic Elemental developed over many years. It first started with some character sketches inspired by the 1990s anime OAV The Heroic Legend of Arslan (the version with the Yoshitaka Amano character designs since there was also a more recent anime adaptation - Amano is also known for his Final Fantasy illustrations). I was taking chemistry at the time, so I named one of the characters after an element from the periodic table.

Later on, I took some of the characters I sketched and wrote a short story about a prince and his bodyguard and their quest for a legendary sword in a cave (which sounds rather cliché on the surface, but there was a plot twist). The short story's main characters had somewhat different personalities and backstories than their current versions in Grand Epic Elemental. I envisioned the short story as an excerpt of a much longer epic and started developing more characters. Then I put it aside, although I would occasionally return to drawing the characters and thinking about different plot ideas.

Fast forward to last year when I started thinking about making a webcomic. In the past, I tended to start stories and not finish them, so I spent about half a year planning, outlining, scriptwriting, and sketching before starting on the actual comic (in those six months, I also watched The Untamed on Netflix, which ended up influencing some of the story's characters and aesthetics).

Finally started publishing the webcomic last October and started the novelization in December. The short story I wrote years ago got modified and was the basis of Episodes 31 and 32 (currently only in the novel version of Grand Epic Elemental, the comic version still hasn't gotten to that point yet).

Other influences on the Grand Epic Elemental comic include:
- the opening scene of the Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind anime (inspired the artwork in Episode 1)
- the desert fight scene from the Chinese film New Dragon Gate Inn and a little bit of Dragon Ball Z (influenced the battle scene in Episodes 5-7)
- CLAMP's RG Veda manga (influenced the appearance of one of the main characters)

Comic version

Novel version

In a world overseen by the goddesses of the four elements, Leiyu accompanies a trade caravan traveling westward to the Kingdom of Ishkhandar. Little does he know, he is about to meet someone who will change his life and embark on a journey to escape fate.

allisoncandraw 2024-01-17 20:54:16 UTC #23

I originally made the characters for "Signs Point to Bobbie" to be side characters in a completely different series. But that series, well, sucked. So eventually I decided to focus on these characters in a slice of life comic instead!

I don't see a lot of comics with deaf/hard of hearing characters, so I thought it'd be interesting to try. Feel free to check it out here

CEWashburn 2024-01-17 22:49:04 UTC #24

I wanted to write a story about trauma. Great idea, right? Especially since I, myself, live with bipolar and severe depression (thanks, pharmaceuticals, for keeping me more or less balanced lol!) I thought, how would two people who have dealt with their own traumas related to each other, much less make a healthy relationship work? Would they be able to support each other, or allow their own pain to come between them? Ultimately, I wanted to write about two people, at minimum, that I would want to support me and love me even if my past or current circumstances might scare others away. I also wanted to make them relatable and someone you'd want to be friends with in real life.

Add in a heavy dose of anime references, a J-Rock band I'm mad obsessed with, humor, and heavy spice, and voila! ANYWHERE!

Leyelle 2024-01-17 23:27:25 UTC #25

So I got hired a few months after I turned 18 to write audio dramas for this company called Headfone. I had a number of great ideas, but they rejected them. So then my older brother and I just sat down and brain stormed a plot that fell within the guidelines of what they told me I COULD do, and we came up with this pretty hilarious plot: it's about this African American woman named Eliza who impulsively decides to quite her job to become an entrepreneur, and the chaos that ensues when her sudden success instigates riots, heists, and even a teenage 'spy.'