Dreamer's Sanctuary

There’s a lot to celebrate this April 20th.  Happy Easter to Christians!  Happy 420 to cannabis users!  And, of course, happy 32nd anniversary to the Backstreet Boys!  How blessed are we to be fans of a band that’s still going strong after more than three decades in the music business?  As a fandom, we may complain about a lot of things – the price of concert tickets and meet-and-greets, the places that get left out of tours, and the time it takes the Boys to put out a new album, just to name a few – but every anniversary serves as a reminder of how grateful we should be to have these things to complain about.  Remember, it could always be worse, as *NSYNC  fans know.  At least our group is still together, still making music, and still performing live shows.  Let’s enjoy it while it lasts!

My readers have one more reason to celebrate today:  Chapter 70 of The World Will Be Waiting is FINALLY up!  I’m sorry it took me so long.  This chapter centers around the In a World Like This album photo shoot, which is well-documented on YouTube.

This “behind the scenes” video the Boys posted was both a blessing and a curse to me.  It was a blessing because it gave me so much material to work with when writing this part of the story.  I did a lot of research about the shooting location, which led me down quite the rabbit hole, let me tell you!  It was also a curse because it inspired me to include way too much detail.  Believe it or not, I started this chapter on January first and, despite adding to it every day, only finished it a few weeks ago.  It was originally like 16,000 words long (which is the length of about four average-sized chapters), but I ended up splitting it into two chapters, which means Chapter 71 is also done and will be posted later this month.  I’m glad to be done with these chapters, but since they do feature all five guys, I figured today would be a good day to post the first part.  I will probably post the second part either this weekend or next Tuesday, which is my site’s anniversary!  Thanks for your patience, as always.  I appreciate you!

Happy April!  For my first of the two Throwback Thursday blogs I have planned for this month, I’m going to take a break from blogging about my fanfics to focus on an April staple here at Dreamer’s Sanctuary: my annual April Fools’ Day prank! For the past twenty-five years, without fail, I’ve posted something for April Fools’ Day. Some years, I spend weeks working on these pranks, while other years (like this year), they come together at the eleventh hour. Sometimes they’re funny, and sometimes they’re lame. To be honest, the pressure I put on myself to deliver something and keep the tradition alive usually stresses me out, to the point that I almost threw in the towel this year and announced that I was letting go of this tradition and leaving it in the past. But I ended up pulling something out of my ass at the last minute, like I often do, so the tradition lives on. Here are my top five favorite April Fools’ Day pranks from the last twenty-five years!

Read“Throwback Thursday #7: Top Five Favorite April Fools’ Day Pranks”

Sorry it’s been so long since my last real update!  As you might have surmised, it’s been a busy couple of months.  I’ve managed to keep my writing streak alive, but it’s been slow-going on The World Will Be Waiting lately.  After working on the same story for so long, I’ve been feeling sort of burnt out, so I decided to start a new project to change things up a bit.

Introducing… Dreamer’s Sanctuary 2.0!  Inspired by BSB’s Millennium 2.0 album and residency, I’ve decided to rewrite my stories from the Millennium era, which is when I first discovered fan fiction.  Back then, I was just a kid with a lot of creativity and a lot to learn.  My ideas were bigger than my talent for bringing them to life.  As I’ve been writing my Throwback Thursday blogs, I’ve  thought about what a shame it is that I can’t include more from the pre-Broken era because I really like the ideas behind many of my early stories – but the execution wasn’t there.  That’s why I wanted to embark on this new writing adventure and do those ideas justice.

This is obviously going to be a time-consuming project; what originally took me a matter of weeks or months to write may take years to rewrite well.  But I’ve already started working on some of my favorites from the year 2000.  Click the links below to access an exclusive sneak peek of each new old story!

Heartache 2.0

Heart of an Angel 2.0

Don’t Wanna Lose You Now 2.0

End of the Road 2.0

Fight for Survival 2.0

One Night 2.0

You can still read the originals over at the Dreamer’s Sanctuary Archive, but I hope you’ll enjoy the updated versions even more.  Feedback is always appreciated!  Thanks, as always, for your support and patience. I’ll be back soon with the next chapter of TWWBW and more Throwback Thursday blogs!

We’re just over a month away from Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s twenty-fifth anniversary, so I’m back with another Throwback Thursday blog. This week, I’m blogging about my favorite musical moments from my fanfiction. Music has always been a big part of my stories, which makes sense when you consider the fact that most of my main characters are musicians. Because I’ve written so many musical scenes over the years, choosing my top five favorites was a challenge. This was the hardest time I’ve had making one of these lists so far! In the end, I went with five scenes that made me feel some sort of way when I reread them – and what a wide range of feelings are represented here! But that’s the power of music. It packs an emotional punch!

Read“Throwback Thursday #6: Top Five Favorite Musical Moments”

March is Women’s History Month, so this week’s Throwback Thursday blog will focus on five of my favorite original female characters. Love them or hate them, OFCs have always been a big part of Backstreet Boys fan fiction. As BSB fangirls, we may not have been able to fulfill our teenage fantasy of hooking up with our favorite Backstreet Boy for real, but we could write a fanfic about it! Those of us who continued to write past our teenybopper years and into adulthood saw our female protagonists evolve from thinly-disguised self-inserts and Mary Sues to more mature, multifaceted characters, who may or may not have hooked up with a Backstreet Boy. Not all of them did!

Case in point…

Read“Throwback Thursday #5: Top Five Favorite Female Characters”

Happy birthday, Brian! I can’t believe you’re fifty! But still looking fine. 😍 In honor of the Birthday Boy, I’m throwing it back by blogging about five of my favorite portrayals of Brian in my fics.

I’ve always been a Brian girl and have actually written a lot of Brian stories, but it doesn’t feel that way because the majority of them were written almost twenty-five years ago! After Brian got married and became a father, I moved away from writing so much about him and started focusing on Nick more because, honestly, it was a lot easier to come up with ideas that involved a main character who was less settled in life. But, since those super old Brian stories I wrote back in high school suck, I’m focusing on my more recent Brian characters in this blog.

Read“Throwback Thursday #4: Top Five Favorite Fanfictional Brian Roles”

Hey!  What an exciting week it’s been in the BSB fandom!  A new Vegas residency announcement, an appearance on Today, a Millennium 2.0 album to look forward to, a brand new song to listen to on repeat now, and a live performance on the SNL 50th Anniversary concert that had a whole room full of celebrities singing along to “I Want It That Way” last night.  And, if all that wasn’t enough, Nick dropped what appears to be his new solo album cover and title earlier today.  Stages!  I love it and can’t wait!  With so many bad things going on in the world, we desperately needed some good news and something to look forward to, and our Boys delivered, like they always do.

I was especially glad to see Kevin come out of hibernation yesterday.  Between bowing out on random BSB appearances and not posting anything about his beloved Chiefs playing in the Super Bowl, I was starting to get a little concerned about him.  I was hoping he was just taking a break from social media and turning down standalone performances that required flying across the world right before Super Bowl weekend, but his absence was starting to trigger bad memories of June 2006.  I’d rather relive the trauma of trying to score tickets for the Into the Millennium Tour than have Kevin leave again.  (And it looks like I’ll be doing that in a few days… yay!)  It was such a relief to see all five Boys together again.  Backstreet’s back, all right!

I’m also back with another chapter of The World Will Be Waiting!  Chapter 69 is up.  This is the last chapter I’ve finished as of now.  Chapter 70 has been an interesting challenge to write, but I’m almost done drafting it, so hopefully I’ll have another story update in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime, I’ll be back this Thursday with my next Throwback Thursday blog, which will focus on the birthday boy, Brian!

It’s finally February, and with Valentine’s Day coming up next week, love is in the air! So is smoke, fear, and hatred from the recent wildfires, plane crashes, and political upheaval here in the United States… but, since this is a fanfic website, and we’re all here to escape the hellscape that is the real world, let’s focus on the love. For my third Throwback Thursday blog, I’m featuring five of my favorite couples from my fics. While I’ve never considered myself to be a true romance writer, many of my novels do include romantic subplots. The original theme of this blog was going to be “favorite romantic chapters,” but when I realized that my top five might all come from the same story, I changed it to couples instead to ensure more variety. As I blog about each pair of characters, I’ll also include a link to one of my favorite romantic chapters that features them.

Read“Throwback Thursday #3: Top Five Favorite Fanfictional Couples”

…it’s nice to have a hobby to distract myself from the horrors of the real world.  My writing hasn’t been going particularly well for the last week or so, but I officially hit three straight years on my writing streak last week and am still plugging away on The World Will Be Waiting!  Chapter 68 is now up.  It starts out sweet and then gets a little spicy, so enjoy!

I’m back with the second in my series of twenty-five retrospective blogs to commemorate this site’s upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary in April! A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated AJ’s birthday with a blog about my top five favorite fictional AJs. Since Nick’s birthday is next, it only makes sense to do the same for him. So here they are, my top five favorite portrayals of Nick!

Read“Throwback Thursday #2: Top Five Favorite Fanfictional Nick Roles”