Wayback Wednesday #20: 2019

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Dreamer’s Sanctuary! On April 29, 2000, I registered my first Geocities account and posted the first pages of my first fanfiction website. I wish I had a screenshot of what the site looked like back then, but sadly, I don’t, and the Wayback Machine doesn’t go back that far. My fifteenth anniversary April Fool’s Day layout comes close, especially the main page, which had a light blue cloud background, purple Comic Sans font (’cause Comic Sans was da bomb back then, at least among us teenyboppers! LOL), and some of the same pictures and graphics. My current layout, which I’ve had for the last few years, pays homage to the original cloud layout.

When I started this site, I had just turned 15 years old and had been writing fanfic for about four months. I only had a few stories to post. Two decades later, I just turned 35 and have over 70 stories posted online. It’s been fun blogging about some of the most memorable ones from the past twenty years over these last twenty weeks.

For my last Wayback Wednesday post, we’re looking back at last year and the story that resuscitated my writing hobby, A Heart That Isn’t Mine.

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t read the story, please do that before you read the rest of this blog.

Title: A Heart That Isn’t Mine

Written: February – November 2019

Straightforward synopsis: Made to believe they are both critically ill, Nick and Brian are held hostage in hospital beds and subjected to physical and mental torture at the hands of a group of sadists who have some sick fetishes.

The story behind the story:
I got the idea for A Heart That Isn’t Mine in June 2017 while I was writing the end of Sick as My Secrets, but the real inspiration for it goes back to December 2007, when I was writing the end of By My Side. Both stories have a lengthy resuscitation scene, but the one in BMS was the first really drawn-out, detailed one I remember writing. I had gotten pretty particular about researching and trying to get things right by that point, and I was no longer worried about looking up things that others might consider weird or morbid for the sake of writing a scene well. I remember putting in this detail about the gurney rattling as the nurse was doing CPR and wondering if that was overly dramatic or a realistic description. I have, thankfully, never had to witness CPR being performed on a person in real life, so all I had to go off of were movies and TV shows, which I know are not necessarily accurate. I went to YouTube, where I clicked on what I initially thought was a video of real CPR being done on a topless woman in a hospital bed, but quickly realized was a trailer for some kind of medical fetish porn. According to Rule #34 of the internet, if it exists, there is porn of it, and apparently, CPR/resuscitation fetish is a thing. The more you know, right? I was rather disturbed, but didn’t think much more about it.

Fast forward almost a decade. As I was writing a similar scene in SAMS, it brought me back to researching for that resuscitation scene in BMS and finding out about CPR fetishes. That’s when I had one of those rare lightbulb moments: What if instead of just roleplaying, someone with such a fetish purposefully caused people to go into cardiac arrest so they could live out their fantasy and resuscitate them for real? It sounded like a delightfully disturbing premise for a horror story.

I’ve always wanted to write a psycho fan or medical torture story, something like Stephen King’s Misery, but I could never come up with a storyline that was original enough or a villain that was believable enough. Back in like 2001, I had an idea for a story called Nonfiction about a fanfic writer or group of writers who starts playing out their favorite fanfics in real life by hurting the Boys one by one, using common fanfic tropes of the time. They were going to stage a bus crash, poison Brian with something that would mimic the symptoms of a heart condition, that kind of thing. I loved the premise, but I was never able to come up with a good enough idea for each Boy or a realistic way for the villain(s) to pull it off without getting caught. A decade later, when we knew something was wrong with Brian’s voice but didn’t know what, I had another idea for a story called Hush about a home health nurse who holds Brian hostage as he’s recovering from vocal cord surgery and on complete vocal rest so he can’t call for help. It could have been a cool story, but plot holes were a problem from the beginning, and looking back, I think would have been too much like a bad Lifetime movie. Thankfully, Brian finally revealed his diagnosis of muscle tension dysphonia, which a little research revealed is not treated with surgery, so I was able to scrap that idea. I still have the sweet banner I made for it, though:

I ended up using elements I loved from both story ideas in A Heart That Isn’t Mine.  I was so captivated by the spark of an idea for this new story, I took a break from finishing Sick as My Secrets and spent two whole days obsessively researching, plotting, and outlining. The basic premise was always going to be that one of the Backstreet Boys ended up being treated/held hostage by a healthcare worker with a resuscitation fetish who convinced him he was critically ill or actually made him critically ill so she could “save” him… sort of a Munchausen Syndrome by proxy scenario, but with a caretaker and patient instead of a mother and child. I knew electrolyte imbalances, especially too much or too little potassium, can cause an irregular heartbeat and even cardiac arrest, so that was my original thought for how she could cause symptoms that could be attributed to a heart condition and induce cardiac arrest.

Once I started digging deeper into the research, I discovered that potassium burns when it’s injected, which would be a dead giveaway if it was administered when it wasn’t supposed to be. I switched the drug of choice to digoxin after reading about a real life serial killer named Charles Cullen, a nurse who murdered anywhere from 40 to 400 of his patients using overdoses of drugs like digoxin, insulin, and epinephrine. I ended up reading an entire book about him called The Good Nurse, which was really interesting. Anyway, digoxin seemed like the perfect weapon for what I was going for because it’s actually a drug that’s prescribed to treat certain heart conditions, so it could be used in plain sight without seeming suspicious… but it’s also easy to overdose on and can cause very serious side effects, including irregular heartbeats and, in extreme cases, cardiac arrest. A lot of the effects of digoxin toxicity are fairly vague and could easily be mistaken for symptoms of advanced cardiomyopathy or congestive heart failure – fatigue, headache, dizziness, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, low blood pressure, fainting, and swelling of the lower extremities. One of the more unique side effects I came across was seeing yellow halos around lights or a yellowish-green hue to everything. If you reread AHTIM with this in mind, you’ll notice how many mentions I made of the room looking yellow when Nick was about to pass out or code. I was curious to see if there were any medical professionals reading who would catch on before the big reveal, but if anyone did, they didn’t mention it to me. There’s also an antidote called digoxin immune fab that can reverse the toxicity, so it seemed plausible that someone with access to both drugs and a lot of knowledge about dosages would be able to use them in combination to manipulate a person’s heart. Probably not as effectively as Dani and Elizabeth did – I definitely took some creative liberties in my portrayal of how successful CPR actually is – but hey, that’s the fun of fiction.

Since the story was going to be heart-related, my first thought was to make Brian the main character. My second thought was that, sadly, it could also work for Nick. I went with Nick for several reasons. First, I’d already written several heart-related Brian stories, so that felt overdone. Second, Nick made it seem more believable. It’s been two decades since Brian’s heart surgery, and thankfully, the research on ventricular septal defect repairs shows that late complications are very rare. In comparison, Nick’s cardiomyopathy diagnosis is more recent and is something that could conceivably get worse if he went back to his old habits and stopped taking care of himself. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have dared to write a story about that because it was too scary, too real. I posted on the Absolute Chaos discussion boards that I “wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole,” but predicted that stories would soon start popping up about Nick’s heart condition. I was wrong, though – that storyline never took off the way Brian heart problem stories did back in the late nineties. Leave it me to be the one to eventually go there. Even in 2017, it seemed taboo to me, but I reminded myself that the ideas that initially make me go “Oh my god, I can’t write that,” usually turn out to be my best ones. Also, Nick has gotten himself into the most trouble over the years, so he seemed more likely to wind up in a bad situation than Brian. Exactly how that would happen was something I still had to figure out.

I loved the idea of luring readers in by making this initially seem like just another one of my medical dramas, a Curtain Call-esque tearjerker about a dying Nick befriending the sweet nurse who takes care of him… and then twisting it into a horror story halfway through by revealing that said nurse is actually a total psycho who’s been causing his illness for her own sick pleasure.

Before I got too far with the plot, I took time to develop the villains, which have always been my Achilles heel when it comes to writing suspense. In the past, I have not written good villains. They tend to come off predictable, cliched, even cartoonish. This works well for characters like Dr. Rough in 00Carter because that story is meant to be an over-the-top comedy, a spoof, but a serious story needs a realistic villain, and that’s what I set out to create in this one.

Dani was the first character I came up with. I decided on her name pretty quickly because I already associate the name “Dani” with crazy BSB fans – no offense to any Danis who are reading this. The song “Sweet But Psycho” by Ava Max hadn’t come out yet, but the first time I heard it, I thought, Wow… that’s Dani. I tried to make Dani charismatic and likeable, as a lot of true psychopaths are. I figured she had to be a psychopath to make the jump from having a weird but otherwise harmless fetish to actually hurting and killing people for her own sick pleasure. I did research on fetishes, trying to figure out the psychology behind them. There’s not much out there on resuscitation fetishes specifically, but I read that some fetishes start as the result of an experience in adolescence, around the time of puberty. That’s how I came up with the back story of twelve-year-old Dani witnessing CPR being performed on a hot teenage boy who had drowned at the beach. That experience would prompt Dani to become a lifeguard and, later, a nurse. I knew she needed to have a medical background to make this work, but I wanted her to be a nurse, not a doctor, so she would be able to realistically spend more time with Nick and develop a relationship with him. Nurses rock! (Just not this one.)

As I started thinking about how Dani could pull something like this off without getting caught, it quickly became clear that she would need accomplices. Elizabeth was the second character I created. I made her a cardiologist so that she would have both the medical expertise and the means to acquire the equipment and drugs they needed. In trying to figure out her motive, I came across the term “cardiophilia,” which is a fixation or fetish for hearts, heartbeats, etc. It made sense that someone with such a fetish would be drawn to cardiology and could relate to a friend with a “resus” fetish.

I envisioned both women as BSB fans from the beginning. Because their motivation was sexual in nature, I imagined that their victims would be people they were attracted to, that they would want to hold captive so they could spend more time with them while secretly keeping them under their control. Dani, of course, would be drawn to Nick, but Elizabeth, the cardiophile, seemed more likely to be a Brian fan. That’s when I started thinking about them involving Brian in their little scheme too and adding some Frick & Frack bromance to the story. Elizabeth would happily use Nick as bait to lure Brian into her clutches.

I decided pretty early on that, rather than try to do this in an actual hospital where they worked, they would kidnap Nick and Brian and keep them in a fake hospital room so they were less likely to get caught. It seemed a lot scarier that way. But how would they hold Nick hostage without him realizing it at first?

They would need more people involved to be able to pull that off, so I created the characters of Rob and Patrick. Rob, like his wife Dani, was a psychopath – charismatic, successful, but also narcissistic and sadistic. I don’t think he had a medical fetish so much as a savior complex. In developing these villains, I also did a lot of research on healthcare serial workers, and one thing a lot of them have in common is this God complex. Whether they’re “angels of mercy” who believe they are “helping” sick or dying patients by easing their suffering or attention-seekers who trigger codes just so they can spring into action and be seen as a hero, these people like to play God, deciding who lives and who dies. Of the four villains, I wrote the least about Rob’s back story in the actual story, but I imagined him as an abused child, possibly a victim of Munchhausen by proxy himself at the hands of his mother. At one point in the story, Dani tells Nick that Rob couldn’t have gotten her pregnant because he’s sterile from chemo treatments he received for childhood cancer. This could have been an outright lie, but I also considered the possibility that Rob was led to believe he really did have cancer as a child. Since he had no control over his life as a kid, he grew up to be an adult who sought to control others through manipulation and abuse. He became a doctor because of this God complex, and his seemingly outgoing personality was just a cover for some deep-seeded psychological issues.

I always pictured Patrick as the kind of creepy loner who lives in his parents’ basement and looks at porn all day. As the brains behind their fetish website, he was always going to be some kind of sexual deviant, but not necessarily a necrophiliac. At one point, I considered having him be in an incestuous relationship with his sister, Elizabeth, but that somehow turned into necrophilia instead. Somewhere along the lines, I had come up with the idea to have their fake hospital set be inside an old funeral parlor that he and Elizabeth had inherited from their father because one, it was creepy, and two, it seemed like it would take less money and effort to transform part of a funeral home into a fake ICU than a regular house. Necrophilia just seemed like the perfect fetish to go with that. Once I imagined Nick stumbling onto the scene of Patrick having sex with the body of his roommate who died at the beginning, I was sold on that idea.

Probably the hardest part to plan was how they would find a way to cut Nick off from the outside world while he was in the “hospital” – no visitors, no phone, no internet, nothing – because obviously he couldn’t talk to any of his family or friends, or he would figure out he wasn’t in a real hospital.

That’s where the fake hurricane came in. A bad enough storm could conceivably cut off power, knock out phone lines and cell towers, cause bad enough flooding to prevent travel, and so on. It could also be the cause of the car “accident” that landed Brian in the bed next to Nick’s, and it could create some dramatic situations with life support machines and generator failures and whatnot. Originally, my plan was to switch back and forth between Nick’s perspective, which would show his perception of reality, and Dani’s perspective, which, in the first half of the story, would actually show all the things she told Nick had happened – him collapsing at the beginning and her saving his life, the hurricane hitting, Brian being brought in after the crash, etc. – but these scenes would later turn out to be excerpts from a fanfic she or Elizabeth was writing while trying to play it all out in real life. Yeah, at one point, one of them was going to write fanfic as a hobby, and the story she posted online was going to be the key to the other Boys and the police finding Nick and Brian.

The whole fanfiction thing got a little convoluted, so I switched it to them running a medical fetish porn website instead. That gave them a more plausible reason to put so much time and money into setting up the fake ICU – it was initially for business, not just for pleasure. I also had some fun mocking the website that, in a roundabout way, gave me the idea for this whole story in the first place. Chapter 33, where AJ, Howie, and Kevin find the Arresting Beauties site, was one of my favorites to write because I just spoofed the type of trailers and descriptions that exist on the real site I based it on. While writing that chapter, I discovered that there is actually a porn actress named Danica Logan who did foot fetish modeling and stuff like that, which I did not know when I made up Dani’s stage name. It’s weird when life imitates art.

Writing this story required a lot of perseverance on my part. It took me three tries to get the version of the story I eventually posted. I started the first draft after I finished Sick as My Secrets in the summer of 2017. That version took place in Georgia and started with Nick attending a horror convention in Atlanta to promote Dead 7, which was where he met Dani and Rob. I kept a lot of elements from that version, like Dani and Rob being dressed as zombies and pitching Nick silly ideas for his next horror movie, because it foreshadowed their dark side. I got distracted from writing it before I got as far as the “hospital” scenes, and then I ended up using the Atlanta horror convention setup for a short story I started later that summer, The Call.

I started a second draft from scratch in December of that year. This second version was a lot different. It was set in New Jersey during Nick’s All American solo tour. Lauren was going to be stuck at home at the end of her pregnancy with Odin, and the villains were going to cut off Nick’s communication with her by faking a blizzard/Nor’easter instead of a hurricane. It started with Brian surprising Nick by coming to see his show, as he was living in nearby New York City while Baylee was doing Disaster! The Musical. Dani and Elizabeth came to Nick’s meet-and-greet, and as they were getting their picture taken, Elizabeth pretended to pinch his ass and actually injected him with a massive overdose of insulin, inducing cardiac arrest caused by severe hypoglycemia. I figured insulin was something she could get away with sneaking into the venue if she claimed to be diabetic, but as I was fact-checking information on dosages and syringe sizes, I realized the type of syringes a diabetic would carry are way too small to hold enough insulin to stop someone’s heart. Back to the drawing board. I got a little further into this second version than I had with the first, but as soon as Nick collapsed backstage, I chickened out and quit writing it. I got on a roll with another story I had started, My Brother’s Keeper, and then 2018 happened, and I basically stopped writing altogether for like six months.

I started the third and final draft of this story in the summer of 2018. What brought me back to it was the Boys’ new single, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” While listening to that song one day, I was struck by the lyrics in the bridge, which suddenly reminded me of Dani and this story idea I’d been struggling with for over a year. “If you’re gonna be someone that hurts somebody just for fun, then do it to a heart that isn’t mine.”

One of the aspects of the story I had always struggled with was the title. It sounds silly, but I can’t write a story without a title, and up until that point, I had not been able to decide on a title for this idea. It had several working titles. I considered using either Quit Playing Games With My Heart or Shape of My Heart because I liked the idea of the title hiding a literal or double meaning that would come to light later in the story. Dani was literally playing games with Nick’s heart and hiding the own “shape” of her dark, twisted heart. But using either of those song titles seemed cheesy. I also considered Leaving My Life in Your Hands after “As Long as You Love Me,” which, if you think about it, is a little creepy and desperate.  “I don’t care you are, where you’re from, what you did…?” For a while, I was going to call it Queen of Hearts, which I thought was cool because, again, there was a double meaning there. Elizabeth was known as the Queen of Hearts because she was a skilled cardiologist, but like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, she was also a murderous villain. The working title I had before I came up with A Heart That Isn’t Mind was Heartsick, which I liked because, once more, there was a double meaning – it seems like Nick is sick, but really the people “taking care” of him are the sick ones. I was never totally sold on that title, though, because it sounded too much like the title of my very first fanfic, Heartache. I have never made more banners than I did for this freaking story as I played around with different titles, none of which I was sold on. You can see a few of my different designs below.

I eventually decided to divide the novel into different parts and name them so I could still use some of those titles and songs, but I thought A Heart That Isn’t Mine was the perfect title for the whole story. It still referenced a BSB song without using its title, and it had the double meaning I was going for. I figured readers would first assume it was a reference to Nick receiving a donor heart – literally, a heart that isn’t his, maybe even Brian’s heart – but really it’s because, unbeknownst to him, his heart is being controlled by someone else who’s hurting him just for fun.

For some reason, changing the title that last time changed everything for me. It got me excited about the idea again, and once more, I scrapped my entire draft and started over from scratch. I moved the setting back to the south, this time in the Florida Keys, so the fake hurricane would seem more believable. I wanted Nick to be alone in Key West so it would be easier for them to kidnap him without anyone knowing and also explain why no one came to visit him in the “hospital” in the beginning, so I decided to have him be estranged from Lauren. I needed a good reason for them to be separated, so I came up with the back story about the stillborn baby, Arya. The death of a child can destroy couples, especially when they cope with their grief in different ways. I have a “no killing real BSB kids” rule and refused to kill off Odin, so I made up a fictional baby… months before Lauren miscarried the real baby we didn’t even know they were expecting in September of that year. By then, I had already written it into the story, so there was no going back at that point, even though I felt bad about it. It occurred to me that if Nick and Lauren tried again, she could end up pregnant at the same time she had been in my story, since I was writing a few months ahead of real life, and sure enough… Saoirse had to have been conceived within a couple of weeks, if not days, of when Arya was in the story. Again, it’s weird when life imitates art, but it did give me a good ending for the story. I was originally going to end it with Lauren being pregnant at the villains’ sentencing hearing, but after Saoirse was born and Nick shared that beautiful video he made of her birth, I changed my plan and decided to use that for the last chapter. It worked out perfectly that way.

I also went back to my original idea of having Dani and Rob use a date rape drug to kidnap Nick instead of actually causing him to go into cardiac arrest at the beginning because that got a little convoluted in the second version. I liked the idea of having the reader experience what Nick does when he wakes up in the “hospital,” having no idea how he got there or what happened to him. In some ways, that actually seemed scarier. The downside to doing that was that at least a couple of you clever readers figured out Dani was full of shit from the very beginning, whereas I think if I had shown him actually collapsing and her doing CPR like she said she did, her story would have been more believable. But based on the feedback I got, I think most readers were shocked by the reveal later in the story, so I’m satisfied with that.

I finally got on a roll with the story in July 2018 and wrote the first few chapters before I went back to work in August. Then I got busy with school starting and took a break from it for a while. As I mentioned last week, what made me go back to it, strangely enough, was the death of my grandfather in November. Over Thanksgiving break, two weeks after he died, I found myself with too much free time to wallow in my grief and in desperate need of something to do to distract myself from it, so I turned to writing. This dark, depressing, disturbing story was exactly the kind of catharsis I needed to work through my own sadness, so I threw myself back into writing it. From that point on, I wrote pretty regularly on it until I finished it about a year later.

I held onto A Heart That Isn’t Mine for a long time before I finally started posting it for other people to read. Part of that was because I felt bad about how flaky I had been with updating for the past four years or so. The last novel I had finished, Sick as My Secrets, took me a lot longer to write than it should have because I was getting my master’s degree through most of it and didn’t have much time or energy to write. I hadn’t made progress on much of anything since SAMS because my writing was all over the place. I didn’t want to leave my readers hanging again by posting a new novel and then not updating it regularly, so I decided to wait until I was further into the story and could post a chapter a week without feeling pressured to write a chapter a week. The other reason I held back was because, quite frankly, the story freaked me out. You all know I love me some medical drama, but the intensity of this one was taking it to a new level of extreme, even for me, so I was worried about what kind of reaction it would get from readers. On one hand, I wanted it to freak other people out – that’s the whole point of horror, right? But on the other hand, even though I loved the premise, there was so much about it that felt controversial, like I was crossing a line I shouldn’t be crossing.

I think that’s a problem that comes with the territory of writing real person fanfic. When you’re writing about purely fictional characters, you can put them through anything and tell yourself, “Whatever, it’s just fiction.” But when those characters are based on real people, real people you love and would never want to see hurt in real life, it seems weird to harm them repeatedly in your stories. And yet, I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing stories about the Backstreet Boys getting hurt or sick, I guess because they combine my love of the Boys with my lifelong interest in medical stuff and love of horror.

For me, A Heart That Isn’t Mine was the perfect blend of all three – BSB, medicine, and horror. I had fun writing it because I enjoyed the challenge of researching and trying to make it both as realistic and as horrific as possible, but it was also a really hard story to write. For every minute I spent actually typing words, I probably spent at least five minutes pacing around, cringing over what I had just written, or agonizing over what to write next. It was painstaking work, but it was a labor of love.

One of the positives of holding onto it for so long before I started posting it was that I had more time to read over what I had written and revise before publishing. I did a lot more revision than I was used to, and I do think it improved the quality of the story. Not only did I probably catch more of my typos and other mistakes that way, but I was also able to add in parts after the fact that I wouldn’t have if I had posted chapters right after I finished writing them. Brian’s tracheostomy storyline was something I went back and added after the fact, partly for believability – in a real ICU, a patient wouldn’t be intubated with an endotracheal tube for more than two weeks because of the risk of infection and other complications – but also because it added to the horror of it, especially the scene where he’s awake while Rob is cutting him open without anesthesia. I also liked the idea that it would leave him with a physical scar afterwards as a symbol of the emotional trauma he had endured.

The downside to not posting right away was that I had no one to share any of this with or get feedback from. I’ve never been one to spill every detail of my stories to other people before I post them – I hate spoilers – but I used to have at least one friend and fellow fanfic writer that I would send chapters to before I posted them publicly or at least bounce ideas off of. I didn’t have that for this story. I wrote it at a time when most of my fandom friends were no longer writing, and the Absolute Chaos forum, where I used to be able to discuss fanfic, was all but dead. I was very much inside my own head for most of this story, and that probably only added to my paranoia about posting it.

I finally decided to post the first chapter on Valentine’s Day of 2019, which seemed fitting in a twisted way that fit the essence of the novel. I had never been more nervous abut posting a new story. I looked forward to the reaction it would get, especially when I finally got to the big reveal in the second half, but I was also afraid readers would think it went too far, first with the drama and then with the horror.

To my relief, no one told me it went too far, and the people who left feedback on it seemed to love it! If I’ve learned anything from writing this story, it’s to never underestimate my readers. There’s a reason you come to this site and read my stories, and it’s because you’re like me – you love the drama, and you love the horror.

Speaking of loving horror, one of my talented readers, Christina, created an incredible drawing of one of her favorite scenes from AHTIM, Nick’s dream in Chapter 48.  Click for the full-size version so you can zoom in and see all the amazing detail.

Clearly, you all are my kind of people! Thank you for that. It’s nice to feel understood, accepted, and appreciated, and that’s one thing I have always loved about the fan fiction community. I would probably die of embarrassment if anyone I knew in real life outside of this fandom ever read my stories, especially ones like AHTIM, but I’m thrilled that there are people out there like me who love the same kind of stuff I love to read and write. Your kind words mean the world to me.

So for anyone who’s actually made it to the end of this very long blog… Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! You guys are a huge part of the reason why I’m still doing this after twenty years later. A Heart That Isn’t Mine showed me that I can enjoy writing just for my own entertainment, but the fact that other people embraced it once I finally posted it proved that feedback makes it all the more fun. Here’s to twenty more years!