Wayback Wednesday #19: 2018

Be sure to get your votes in for Round 3 of the Story Tournament before Saturday! Personally, I thought the battle between Curtain Call and Sick as My Secrets would be a lot closer than it was last time I looked… but maybe the slash fans haven’t had their say yet.

Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s 20th anniversary is only one week away, so this is the second to the last of the Wayback Wednesday blogs I’ve been doing. For this week’s blog, we’re going back to 2018, which isn’t even really worth blogging about because it was the worst year of my life, a year in which bad things happened and I wrote next to nothing. I don’t even have a story to reflect on for 2018 because, although I worked on several over the course of the year, I literally only updated one, 1000 Ways to Kill Nick Carter, and I already blogged about that one. Sad panda.

2018 started off promisingly. I posted on New Year’s Day, bragging about what a productive winter break I’d had so far, how I’d started not one, but two new novels. And that was true! I started the story that would eventually become A Heart That Isn’t Mine for the second time, after scrapping the first draft I’d started the previous summer. (More on that next week.) I also started a Kevin/Nick story called My Brother’s Keeper, which I felt good enough about to share a “sneak peek” of, but not confident enough about to post “officially” with the implied commitment of continuing to update it regularly. After four years of being flaky with my updates due to being busy with my master’s classes and life in general, I was determined to be more consistent about updating my next story, so I wanted to wait until I was far enough into said story to start posting it. For the second year in a row, I made a New Year’s resolution, this time to write something every day. I’d kept the previous year’s resolution to write every weekend for longer than I thought I would, and it definitely helped me get back on track and finish Sick as My Secrets sooner than I had expected to. Surely, making another resolution would help me get going on another story, right?

Wrong. So wrong.

It’s a good thing I held off on “officially” posting My Brother’s Keeper. I should never have put up the sneak peek in the first place. In fact, I probably jinxed myself because, as I sat down to write the next day, the hard drive on my laptop promptly died, rendering it useless. Having been screwed over by laptops in the past, I had learned my lesson the hard way and did not have anything saved on the hard drive, so I didn’t lose any important files… just my motivation and the convenience of being able to write wherever I wanted to. I still had my reliable but ancient desktop computer, but I had been spoiled by the convenience of having a laptop, so this definitely put a damper on my productivity. Still, I was determined to keep writing, even if I had to do it from the discomfort of my crappy office chair.

Although I had already run into writer’s block with My Brother’s Keeper, I kept my resolution to write something every day for eight days before disaster struck again. On January 9, AJ’s birthday, my beloved cat Lucifer (Luci) unexpectedly passed away. She was only eleven, so I was in no way prepared to lose her so suddenly, and I was utterly devastated. I don’t have kids, so my cats are like my children. Luci had literally walked into my life as a stray kitten and had been there my entire adulthood, moving with me from my parents’ house to my first apartment after college and from that apartment to my first house. She was my baby, the sweetest and best pet I have ever had, the exact opposite of her namesake (which was more the cat from Cinderella than the devil, just to be clear), and her untimely death destroyed me.  Overwhelmed by grief, I stopped forcing myself to write and simply let myself wallow for a while.

I didn’t update again until July, when I wrote and posted a new death for 1000 Ways to Kill Nick Carter called “Butterfingers,” inspired by all Nick’s Instagram posts about his new keto diet. Besides the ill-fated sneak peek of My Brother’s Keeper, that was the only story update I made all year.

That’s not to say that was all I wrote in 2018. July was actually a pretty productive month for me. I made some progress on the BSB/ER crossover story I’ve been working on sporadically for the past few years. (For the record, I’ve already decided I will not be posting that one until it’s finished, but I do feel confident that it will be finished someday.) I also started the third and final version of A Heart That Isn’t Mine, which I will be blogging about next week for my last Wayback Wednesday post. But once I went back to work in August, I got busy and stopped writing again.

What got me started again, ironically, was the very thing that had gotten me off track at the beginning of the year: loss and grief. My grandpa passed away in mid-November. Unlike with Luci, his death was not unexpected. He was 86 years old with end-stage cancer and had just started hospice care at home. I have always been close with my grandparents, so I was devastated by his death and still miss him very much, but it was a different kind of grief than I experienced after losing Luci. Once I got through the first couple of weeks, which were filled with tears and family and the memorial service and a somber Thanksgiving, the pain started to fade, and I just felt sad. I needed to distract myself from feeling sad and find something else to focus on, so in the days I had off after Thanksgiving, I turned to my old favorite form of distraction: writing fanfic.

It may seem weird that I would want to write something as dark and death-oriented as A Heart That Isn’t Mine so soon after losing a loved one, but that depressing story was exactly what I needed to get through my own depression. I’ve always loved sad stories because they’re cathartic; I feel better after a good cry, and focusing on the problems of fictional characters (or, in this case, the fictional problems of real people), which are usually worse than mine, helps put things into perspective. A Heart That Isn’t Mine is the story that finally pulled me out of my funk and got me writing consistently consistently again for the first time in over a year. I’ll be back next week to blog all about it!