I hope you’re enjoying My Brother’s Keeper so far! I have been wanting to write an author’s note about the background of this novel and was waiting for the right point in the story to put it. I think this is that point.
If you’re one of my regular readers, you’ve probably realized this is the third story of mine in a row to include a spinal cord injury as a plot point – and the second story in a row that involved Kevin in that particular plot. Sorry, Kevin. I promise this is not my new version of the “Nick cancer story.” The three stories were planned and started years apart, and I never intended to post them all in a row. That’s just the way it worked out.
I got the basic idea for the story that would become My Brother’s Keeper back in the summer of 2013. Two things happened that summer that inspired it. First, there was a mini-trend on Absolute Chaos of what I called “wheelchair stories.” There were at least three different stories written by different authors that summer that had one of the Backstreet Boys in a wheelchair, which I thought was interesting. In all my years of writing medical drama, I had never put one of the Boys in a wheelchair permanently (or at least long-term), so I thought, Well, maybe I should jump on that bandwagon. I bet I could write the shit out of a wheelchair story because that is right up my alley. Then In a World Like This came out, and I heard the bonus track “Take Care” and thought, Well, this would be perfect inspiration for a hurt/comfort fic. I combined that thought with the wheelchair thought and came up with the idea for My Brother’s Keeper.
It was always going to be a Kevin and Nick idea because of Nick’s part in “Take Care” that goes, “You’ve always stood so tall. I never thought you’d fall. But now it’s you that’s fading.” It sounded like he was describing Kevin, someone he’d always looked up, both figuratively and literally. I thought it would be interesting to sort of reverse their big brother/little brother roles by making Kevin the dependent one and forcing Nick to grow up and become more of a caretaker. That’s why I decided to set it in the past, during the tail end of Nick’s hot mess phase. I also liked the idea of Mason being a baby and Kevin having to figure out how he’s going to take care of his kid when he can’t even take care of himself. Of course, that also meant I had to kill off Kristin. I did not enjoy doing that, but it was necessary to further my Kevin and Nick plot. Sorry, Kristin.
When I came up with the idea, I had already started writing Sick as My Secrets and was about to start my master’s program, both of which would take me another few years to finish, so I knew the timing wasn’t right to start writing it then. I came back to it in the summer of 2017, after finishing SAMS, and spent a lot of time outlining and researching for it. I started writing it that July, along with the story that would eventually become A Heart That Isn’t Mine. I didn’t really get into a groove with it until December of that year, at which point it was going so well that I decided to post a sneak peek on New Year’s Day. This proved to be a bad decision when, days later, my laptop died, I hit a wall with the story, and my writing came to a standstill. I still believed in the idea enough to know I would come back to it eventually, when the time was right. I ended up writing A Heart That Isn’t Mine first. Then I finished Heroic Measures and wrote The Road to Bethlehem. I really didn’t think I would want to come back to My Brother’s Keeper right after finishing Bethlehem, so I tried to start the Brian horror story I’ve had outlined for a few years. When that didn’t really take off, I tried revising my first draft of My Brother’s Keeper, and whaddya know – the timing was finally right, after all! I got over my writer’s block and have been working on it consistently since the beginning of February. I’m really enjoying writing my first Kevin novel and hope you’re enjoying it, too. Thanks for reading!
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