Hello everyone! I’ve missed being able to update these last few weeks. Since finishing A Heart That Isn’t Mine, I have started the new pandaskunk story I mentioned back in November, but it’s not very far along yet. I’m still hoping to be able to post at least a part or two before Christmas, but the reality is that I’ll still be writing this thing after the holidays. I hope you won’t mind reading it then. I would just wait until next December to post it in its entirety, but it incorporates recent events in the fandom, so it won’t be as timely next year. Thanks for bearing with me.
As we approach the new year, we are also nearing a significant milestone… besides the youngest Backstreet Boy turning forty, I mean. April 29, 2020 will mark Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s twentieth anniversary! Off the top of my head, I can’t name another BSB fanfic site that is twenty years old and still actively being updated. My site has never been the biggest or the best, but it may be the longest-lasting – and hey, I’ll take pride in that!
To commemorate this milestone, I’m going to start a weekly series of “Wayback Wednesday” posts that will span the twenty-year history of the site and my fanfic writing “career,” spotlighting one of the stories I wrote each year. Newer readers may be interested in seeing where I started (and how far I’ve come since), while longtime readers may enjoy the nostalgia. And for those who don’t care at all, that’s okay too – I just thought this would help fill the gap in updates until I’m ready to start posting a new story.
We begin way back in the year 2000. I started writing fanfic right around this time of year, twenty years ago, when I was fourteen. My first attempt at a fanfic was just a few scenes written in a notebook. I ended up abandoning that story and starting another, which I will get to in a moment, but I later went back to that original idea and rewrote it as Years of Grace, which was published online in 2001.
The second story I started was also the first fanfic I finished and the first one I shared with the world online. It was called Heartache, and it’s the story I’m spotlighting in this first post because it’s really where this all began!
Title: Heartache
Written: Winter 2000
Straightforward synopsis: After his heart condition worsens, Brian waits for a heart transplant while falling in love with a barely-legal teenage girl.
The story behind the story:
When I first discovered fanfic in the summer of 1999, just over a year after Brian’s heart surgery, stories about Brian’s heart condition were all over the place. As a Brian girl who had already read every Lurlene McDaniel tearjerker I could get my hands on, I ate that shit up – sorry, Brian. Heartache was inspired by the best of that original batch of Brian heart problem stories, a novella called Cardio, which is about Brian dying from terminal heart disease. As I sat at my computer, puffy-eyed and crying, I couldn’t help wondering, Why wasn’t a heart transplant ever considered as an option? Couldn’t that have saved Brian’s life? It worked for the characters in Lurlene McDaniel’s One Last Wish novels! That idea of “What if Brian had been put on the transplant list?” is what inspired me to write a less depressing version of the Brian heart problem story, in which Brian does eventually get a transplant and finds love in the process.
If I remember correctly, his eventual love interest, an eighteen-year-old nursing assistant named Alexa, was originally a sixteen-year-old hospital volunteer. To me, as a fourteen-year-old, sixteen must have seemed mature enough to have a romantic relationship with an almost twenty-five-year-old Backstreet Boy (after all, I was totally ready to marry Brian until he announced he was engaged to Leighanne – I cried when I found out), but I must have realized it would be considered statutory rape to have Brian be with a sixteen-year-old and upped her age to eighteen instead.
Having just finished another heart-related story, it’s fun for me to look back at this one and see the huge difference in the quality of my writing. I was still learning about how to be more descriptive and “show, not tell.” I also didn’t do any research for this story and its sequels beyond rereading outdated Lurlene McDaniel books (Someone Dies, Someone Lives was most influential for this one), and I’m sure that shows, too. But every writer has to start somewhere, and this was the first “novel” I ever finished.
I was very proud of finishing Heartache, proud enough to work up the courage to contact the owners of some fanfic sites that hosted other authors’ stories to see if they would host mine. I was oddly okay with the idea of strangers reading my writing online, but I was terrified of my friends, who were all BSB fans at the time, finding and making fun of it, so I came up with my pen name, Julie Lewis, and created a new Hotmail email address to go with it. I’m so grateful to that self-conscious fourteen-year-old who had the forethought to use a fake name because now, twenty years later, it has kept my colleagues, my students, and their parents from finding my fanfic by googling my real name. Thank god.
My first acceptance was from a site called Escape from Reality, which is actually still online, but stopped updating right after posting the first six chapters of my story. It never got posted there in its entirety, but it was enough. After a month of being online, I got an email with my very first piece of feedback from a girl named “Rachel,” who eventually became my very first online friend and fanfic co-author. Rachel had her own fanfic site, so she started hosting Heartache and my subsequent stories. Less than two months later, I followed her lead and decided to try building a website of my own. That’s how Dreamer’s Sanctuary was born!
Once I started writing fanfic, I didn’t stop. That first year, 2000, was my most prolific year. I was a machine, churning out story after story, averaging one “novel” a month and posting at least one chapter almost every day. I finished fourteen “novels” and wrote ten short stories that year, including two sequels to Heartache. Although I keep putting the word “novels” in quotes because none of them were really long enough to qualify as a true novel, I still don’t know how I managed to be that productive while I was in school all day and had homework to do at night. I guess I was running on pure inspiration! I will never be that productive again – quality over quantity – but I have to admire the focus and stamina I had back then.
I’ll be back next week with another post and hopefully Part I of my new pandaskunk story!