Wayback Wednesday #7: 2006

Happy birthday, Nick! Technically it’s still Tuesday in my time zone, but I’m posting my Wayback Wednesday a little early so I can wish our beloved youngest Backstreet Boy a happy fortieth. Now that all five of our Boys are in their forties, I guess we’re officially old! Oh well… at the rate I’m going, I’ll happily keep writing fanfic about them in my retirement.

Speaking of writing, I’m sorry for not updating on Saturday. After spending the past few weekends basically hibernating because of bad weather, I actually had plans this weekend and didn’t get any writing done, so the next part of The Year Without a Pandaskunk isn’t finished yet. I’ve actually been doing a lot more reading than writing the last couple of weeks, trying to get through By My Side for the sake of this post. This week’s Wayback Wednesday will be the second part of my blog on BMS.

I may have mentioned this last week, but By My Side is one of only a couple of my stories that I have never gone back and read all the way through since finishing it. Not that I regularly sit around reading my own stories, but I’ve found that it is kind of fun to read them after they’re finished. It gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment, as well as nostalgia, but it also helps me grow as a writer. When enough time has passed that I can step back and look at my writing from a reader’s perspective, I’m better able to see what worked and what didn’t, learn from past mistakes, and improve in future stories.

I think its length is the main reason why I’ve never read BMS in its entirety. It’s the longest story I have ever or will ever write, and as a reader, the thought of getting through 200+ chapters is intimidating, even when I’m the one who wrote them! Props to any of you who read it for the first time after it was finished. But for the sake of this blog, I really did want to read BMS and refresh my memory on some of the parts I may have forgotten in the twelve years since I finished it. So I did!

I have always felt that while BMS is better-written, Broken has the better storyline, and I still think that’s true. Broken was more of a page-turner for me as a reader, but BMS definitely has a more consistent and mature writing style. The plot is perhaps a bit overinflated with too much happening over too long a time period compared to Broken, but I didn’t get bored reading it like I worried I would. Reading it actually reminded me why I put all those subplots in – it wasn’t just to fill chapters and make the story longer; it was to give my characters something to do while I kept them apart.

Part 3 of the story, in which Claire marries Jamie, gets pregnant, and moves to Iowa, while Nick tries to move on with other women and battles BOOP, was definitely the hardest part of the story to get through because they’re separated for most of it. I loved the idea of having Claire make a huge mistake in marrying Jamie and ending up in an unhappy marriage so she could come crawling back to Nick later, but knowing it would take a couple of years for all that to play out, I had to come up with enough to keep Nick busy in the meantime. It was important to me to keep a balance between them – I couldn’t just write about Claire in what was supposed to be a Backstreet Boys fanfic. So that’s why Nick’s storylines – his relationship with Veronica, the BOOP, the support group, and his new solo album – were important. Since torturing Nick is one of my favorite pastimes, I had fun knocking him back down to rock bottom while Claire’s life seemed totally together.

Of course, the tides turn toward the end of Part 3, when the collapse of Claire and Jamie’s marriage begins. One of the hardest and most heartbreaking things I wrote in this story was them having to make the decision to “selectively reduce” her pregnancy from triplets to twins. I couldn’t decide myself what Claire should do, so I had my readers help make the decision for her (and me). Those of you who read this as it was being written may remember that I posted a poll at the bottom of Chapter 144, asking readers to vote between reducing the number of babies from three to two or proceeding with the triplet pregnancy. It was almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure, sick as that sounds. I was prepared to go with the majority, having plotted two possible outcomes. 62% of readers voted for Claire to do the reduction, but had they opted for her to keep all three babies, I was going to give her an even rougher pregnancy, riddled with complications, have her go into preterm labor, and almost kill her during childbirth. One of the three babies, a boy they would have named Shaine, would have died from complications of being born prematurely, leaving Claire and Jamie with twin girls either way. This whole storyline was meant to drive a wedge between the two of them – either Jamie would resent Claire for aborting one of the babies, or he wouldn’t be able to deal with the loss of his son after he was born. The end result would have been the same either way.

I mentioned The OC in the first BMS blog as being a show I was obsessed with during the years I was writing this story. While I wouldn’t say anything I wrote in BMS was directly inspired by The OC, I do see the influence it had in the way some of the storylines play out, especially with the Nick/Claire/Jamie/Laureen love rhombus. Nick and Jamie physically fighting each other seems a bit over the top, but very Ryan Atwood – and, I’ll admit, so satisfying to read! Claire conveniently going into labor while her parents and Jamie are out of town and Nick’s the only one with her, ensuring that he’ll have to be the one to take her to the hospital and fill in as her birth coach, also feels OC-esque in a way – because of course Nick had to be there for the birth of her babies!

I found Part 4 of the story much more fun to read. Like the Boys sing in “Breathe,” “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” and that is definitely true in BMS. Claire had to hit her breaking point before she could see the light, leave Jamie, and come back to Nick. Knowing Nick and Claire would eventually get back together was what kept me writing through all the chapters where they were apart. Reading the scenes of them finally rekindling their romance was the reward for getting through the sickening Claire and Jamie stuff. I loved the scene in Chapter 182 where Nick and Claire kiss after drinking smoothies so much, I included it in my next site layout. Click the link, look toward the bottom, and right above the picture of Nick, you can see the line, “Above every other flavor, she tasted most of strawberries,” which I have always adored. There’s even a little strawberry over his left hand.

But, of course, I couldn’t make it that easy for Nick and Claire. Just like in Broken, I knew I needed to throw another dramatic, climatic, life-or-death situation at them toward the end. The car crash had been planned since the beginning for that purpose. I couldn’t resist almost killing Nick, and I wanted Claire to pay for her bad decisions by being faced with the possibility of losing the love of her life. Chapter 196, the aftermath of the accident, is still one of my favorite chapters I have ever written because of its intensity. I still remember my heart racing and my stomach churning as I wrote that scene. Although the car accident was meant to be a shocking moment that came out of nowhere, like a real accident, I also tried to connect it to previous events. I planned it so that Nick’s amputation was key in saving his life. His left leg was pinned – had it been his real leg, not a prosthesis that could be removed, he would have been trapped in the burning car. On the other hand, the smoke inhalation and respiratory issues he had after the fact were worsened by the previous damage to his lungs from cancer and BOOP. But I never seriously considered killing him at that point in the story. After everything he had been through, he deserved to have a happy ending.

I was originally going to end the story with Nick and Claire getting married. Between their wedding and Claire’s first wedding with Jamie, I had a lot of fun wedding-planning online while I was writing this story. I designed both of Claire’s engagement rings and picked out both of her wedding dresses, as well as bridesmaid gowns, flowers, music, etc. – and then I went ahead and planned a funeral, too.

After everything they had gone through, I imagined Nick and Claire growing old together and becoming one of those sweet, elderly couples you hear about in the news every once in awhile, who die within days of each other because one literally can’t live without the other. The actual ending (or “post-epilogue,” as I invented to keep the chapter count from going past a perfect 200 plus epilogue) was inspired by one of my favorite fanfics, Cover Me With Dreams, which had a huge influence on this story. CMWD had been recommended to me by one of my readers, and I read it for the first time as I was finishing Broken and first planning for BMS. It took me a couple of tries to get into it, but once I did, I got really into it. I loved the characters of Nick and Ciara and their relationship, which began as a childhood friendship, later turned into an adult romance, and lasted literally until death did them part. Theirs was a well-written, mature love story, not the typical teenybopper romance I was used to reading.

This was very influential as I embarked on the challenge of writing my first true adult novel, for BMS was not only the first story I wrote as a legal adult, but also the first one with “adult content” besides just language. Yes, BMS also features my very first sex scene, LOL. As a teenager, I wasn’t comfortable or experienced enough to write explicit sex scenes, preferring to “fade to black” or simply summarize and gloss over the intimate details of my characters’ sex lives. But as I matured and started reading more stories like CMWD, which has some nice, steamy sex scenes, I thought maybe I should give it a try. I really didn’t think my first attempt at a sex scene would be in BMS because I worried that Nick being an amputee would give it a weird, fetishy vibe; in fact, I remember saying to myself, “I will write a sex scene someday, but it won’t be for this story.” Well, as I have since learned about myself, the moment I swear I’ll never do something, it becomes almost like a challenge to me… and eventually, I will go back on my word and do the exact thing I said I’d never do. In this case, write a sex scene – or three – choppage and all. Writing sex scenes is still not something I’m super comfortable with – it typically involves a lot of giggling and immaturity on my part – but this story showed me I can do it when the story calls for it, even if it requires research on suitable positions for one-legged partners.

Speaking of sex and research… something else I learned from writing these two stories is that, along the lines of Rule #34 of the internet, there is a fetish for anything and everything. I stumbled onto amputee fetishism (“devotees”) fairly early on in the research process for Broken and found a way to include that in BMS. I accidentally discovered there is such a thing as a CPR fetish while researching for the end of BMS (and got a whole new story idea out of that discovery a decade later). What I didn’t realize until much later was how many other weird medical fetishes people have and want to read stories about. To this day, I still see Google searches for things like “catheter fanfiction” come up in my site stats, and they almost always lead to either Broken or BMS. But hey, to each their own – if you happened to stumble onto my site by searching for something similar, no judgment here. Lord knows I’ve looked up plenty of weird stuff for these stories and learned way more than I ever thought I would want or need to know about certain subjects, LOL.

Together, Broken and By My Side were truly my “coming of age” stories. I wrote in blog for Broken about how Broken carried me from high school into college. BMS carried me through the rest of college and on into the real world of adulthood. I literally spent half my last year of high school, my entire four years of college, and half of my first year of teaching writing about Nick and Claire. These two stories taught me how to research, helped me hone my craft, and turned me into the writer I am today. I may have written better stories since, in terms of quality, but I will always think of this series as my magnum opus. Not only will I never write anything this long again (together, the two stories are well over 2,000 pages and a million words long), but, much like lightning in a bottle, it has a certain magic that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to capture again.

It’s been exactly 17 years since I posted the beginning of Broken and 12 years since I posted the end of By My Side – both on January 28, Nick’s birthday. I wrote these stories at the perfect time, when Backstreet Boys fanfic was at its peak and Nick was still young and single. I think Nick became my favorite Backstreet Boy to write about during this era, in part, because of the freedom he brought with him. I’ve always enjoyed romance as a subplot, but after Brian got married and had Baylee, it became too much of a challenge to come up with creative ways to get rid of Leighanne and pair him with original characters, so I started writing about Nick instead. Now that Nick is married with children, too, it’s hard to imagine writing another epic romance about him with some random, made-up woman. I think the fact that my last two novels ended with him getting back together with Lauren speaks to that point. One of the interesting aspects of writing real person fanfiction is that real people grow and change, and the types of stories we write about them change over time, too. I’ve enjoyed exploring other genres over the years and written other stories I’m proud of, but the Broken series will always have a special place in my heart.

So happy birthday, Nick, and happy anniversary to both Broken and By My Side! I’ll be back next week with a blog about a different story!