In Love Bites, teenaged Kieren is dealing with all the familiar struggles of high school: grades, dating, family drama… oh, and did we mention that he’s a vampire? But Kieren’s (after)life is about to become more complicated, because Mason Kane, the son of the werewolf alpha, is joining Kieren’s class… and oops! He’s irresistibly hot!
Love Bites began as the Wattpad novel Bite Me by Alicia Wallace and was adapted to WEBTOON. Now, episodes 1 to 21 of the WEBTOON series have been collected in a physical volume from WEBTOON Unscrolled. Love Bites, Vol. 1 is adapted by Ele with characters and flats by Anzai, storyboards by Saisho and backgrounds, flats and renders by Jun, and produced by Sarah Wang & Mitzi Lovelace. And best of all, Love Bites, Vol. 1 is available now at your local bookstore and/or public library!
To mark the occasion, K-Comics Beat caught up with Wallace over email to learn about the new physical release from WEBTOON Unscrolled, Love Bites, Vol. 1.
AVERY KAPLAN: Can you tell us about the origins of Love Bites? Where did the original inspiration come from?
ALICIA WALLACE: It’s silly. I wasn’t even into vampires and werewolves at that age, and I hadn’t seen or read a second of Twilight. I was really into the Percy Jackson series, though, and deeply invested in a supernatural Nico di Angelo x Will Solace fanfiction that I was reading on tumblr. I think I was just so taken by the concept of a gay vampire/werewolf romance that when the author stopped updating, I had to take matters into my own hands and make one for myself.
KAPLAN: What was the process of writing the original story like? How has your writing process changed in the intervening years (if it has)?
WALLACE: Honestly, it’s a blur. I wrote the original story a decade ago, and I don’t remember what was going through my head for most of it. What I do remember is: I was writing entirely on my phone, often at night when I was supposed to be sleeping. I uploaded every week or two without editing—maybe one run through if I was feeling serious. My idea of “planning” was an unpublished chapter at the start of the book with a bulleted list of every idea that had come to my head but didn’t fit into the story yet.
I still do most of my writing too late at night, so I guess some things never change. The biggest difference overall in my process is that I am much, much slower. I edit kind of obsessively, but also, I think a lot more about every sentence. A huge part of my project while reworking Bite Me was to be more intentional with the space. Even in the silly moments, I’m always asking myself, why is this here? What is it doing? I think it worked out, because the rewrite is actually (slightly) shorter than the original even though it’s denser.
KAPLAN: What was it like to see your story adapted to WEBTOON? How involved were you in this process? And now the WEBTOON Unscrolled physical edition of Love Bites is being published. Were you involved in this second adaptation process?
WALLACE: It’s been the most fun ever. The Love Bites team did such a phenomenal job; the adaptation is hilarious and so full of love you can feel it. It was exciting to see what they kept from the original story and what they changed; even more so when I saw that we were making some of the same changes despite working separately. My involvement was pretty minimal—I answered some character questions and such, but it was already in production when I found out about it, so I mostly got to sit back and enjoy it.
I was more closely involved with the voice actor casting and sound choices for the video episodes. With the physical edition, I looked through the proof for mistakes, but there wasn’t much else they needed from me. I’m pretty swamped with school and teaching, so I appreciate that they don’t overload me.
KAPLAN: Can you tell us about the worldbuilding for Love Bites? Obviously, there is quite a lot of vampire and werewolf tropes to draw upon. Did you have any particular sources of inspiration?
WALLACE: The fun thing about writing a story like this in early high school is that you really don’t care about the rules. If I was doing this for the first time now, I’d be checking out books and binging vampire movies and deep-diving on Reddit to get the lore straight.
At 14, though? I took the idea that vampires and werewolves didn’t like each other and ran with it. There was a specific story that I wanted, and I would get it one way or another. I wanted the romantic leads to hate each other right away, so I made the vampire vs. werewolves beef a genetic predisposition. I didn’t like the idea of vampires outliving their loved ones or only coming out at night, so I invented a trade—aptly named “the Trade”—where they could exchange their immortality for tolerance to the sun. I didn’t want the love interest to seem like a complete jerk, so I invented an alpha werewolf complex to explain his actions. I actually cut that last detail when I rewrote the novel—I wanted the characters to be held accountable, not to justify their mistakes with supernatural cheat codes.
For the most part, though, I didn’t change much of the lore in the rewrite. I definitely did more research, but I also tried not to suffocate the story by imposing a bunch of limits and caveats that weren’t there before.
I had to remind myself: vampires and werewolves are literally not real. You can do whatever you want. I learned something from my 14-year-old self with that one.
KAPLAN: Is Love Bites a personal story for you at all?
WALLACE: It’s personal in the sense that it’s been a part of my life for so long and changed everything for me, but as far as relating to it, it honestly started as the opposite.
When I wrote it the first time, I didn’t see any of myself in the characters, and I didn’t particularly want to. Their personalities, experiences, and choices were a far cry from anything about me. We weren’t even the same species.
The fact that I was solely writing male main characters back then reflects the sort of escapist nature of my teenage writing, which I think a lot of adolescent writers can relate to. Bite Me is personal to me as an adult because looking back, it gave me a queer space to exist without pressure before I knew I was queer myself, and because I likely wouldn’t be on this path, pursuing my education and career as a creative, if not for this story. Bite Me brought the majority of my Wattpad followers, and that following led to opportunities that kept me writing in college, encouraging me to take the fiction workshops that set me on this path.
KAPLAN: Do you have any particularly memorable interactions with fans of Love Bites?
WALLACE: It’s always really striking to me when someone tells me they were reading Bite Me back when I started updating it in 2016. Knowing that people cared enough about it then to keep up with it ten years later and send their support just warms my heart so much. Those people who blew the story up on Wattpad are the ones who brought me here. It’s also lovely thinking about the fact that they were teenagers, too, when they read it the first time, and now they can read it again, revamped, as adults. It’s like we grew up together.
KAPLAN: What has it been like to pursue your MFA in creative writing? What made you decide to pursue this degree?
WALLACE: It’s been the best choice I ever made. I went through undergrad as a microbiology major on the pre-med track because I was good in STEM and wanted to make money. And I did just fine, but I was so under-stimulated I felt like I was going crazy. It was information overload without any real desire to recall it—I just didn’t care, as much as I tried to. Which was sad, because I’ve always loved school. I took fiction workshops whenever I could fit them into my lecture schedule, and those were the classes I looked forward to.
My junior year came with a crisis of what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life, and around that time, one of my writing professors told me I should pursue an MFA. I hadn’t even known it was an option. I’m lucky to have supportive parents who told me the money wasn’t worth my misery.
I love the different ways that my classes force me to think and the fact that there isn’t often a right or wrong answer, and more than anything, I’m glad to be around like-minded people in class. It’s made me a much, much better writer. The fiction I write in that program is very different from Bite Me, and training both of those muscles has definitely made me better in either genre.
KAPLAN: Is there something you’re excited for readers of the print edition to see?
WALLACE: I think I’m just excited for everyone to meet these characters as they are now. My biggest goal with the Bite Me rewrite was to flesh everyone out and give them more dimension. The original story was really focused on the humor and the drama, and rewriting it, I wanted to preserve those things while also reorienting the details around the characters so that they felt real and dynamic and specific. I think the readers will really like getting to know them.
Love Bites, Vol. 1 is available at a local bookstore and/or public library near you now.
