Merry Christmas! I want to wish everyone a happy holiday, full of flying pandaskunks, rocket ships, and random fun.
In continuing with my weekly series of retrospective posts leading up to the site’s twentieth anniversary in April, Part 2 takes us back to 2001, to a light-hearted, fluffy little romance I wrote called Beside the Ocean. Just kidding about the “light-hearted, fluffy” part. In true Julie fashion, this is a love story about death.
Title: Beside the Ocean
Written: May-August 2001
Straightforward synopsis: After attempting suicide, Nick meets and falls for his new next door neighbor, Olivia, who, unbeknownst to him, is dying of a terminal illness.
The story behind the story:
Beside the Ocean was inspired by the song “I Hope You Dance” by LeeAnn Womack, which was popular the year I wrote it. The title comes directly from the lyric, “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean.” The plot of this story very much fits the time at which it was written. I went through a little emo phase in 2000-2001, when I was fifteen/sixteen. I discovered Linkin Park and started listening to more rock music, hence the inclusion of Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” in the opening scene of this story (I often listened to that song on repeat myself). I thought and wrote about suicide a lot. I don’t think I was ever clinically depressed or seriously suicidal; I was just immature and melodramatic and thought about it in a “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone” kind of way whenever I was upset with my parents. In any case, it’s a theme that shows up in a lot of my stories from this period, including this one.
Of all the old stories I have posted on the Dreamer’s Sanctuary Archive, Beside the Ocean is probably my favorite. I have always loved the simple premise of it: a suicidal guy meets a dying girl who desperately wants to live; he helps her cross off some things on her bucket list before she dies, and she teaches him to appreciate life. Could it have been executed better? Absolutely. In fact, if I believed in rewriting stories, this is one I would consider worth redoing because I believe in the basic idea of it so much.
It’s not a terrible story as it currently exists, especially when compared to earlier stories like Heartache. By the summer of 2001, I had figured out how to show, not tell, so there’s a lot less summarizing. I may have done more medical research as well, incorporating not only Lurlene McDaniel books (mainly Till Death Do Us Part and Mourning Song), but also a paper I wrote on brain tumors for my high school health class and, of course, ER (this was written just after Season 7, when Mark Greene gets diagnosed with his brain tumor, but before his death in Season 8). That being said, it’s still overly simplistic, and the female lead, Olivia, falls flat. Besides her age, appearance, hometown, and medical history, all we learn about her is that she loves the ocean and wants to fall in love with another human. We never hear much about what she likes to do in her free time, what she would have majored in in college or done for a career, or anything that would make her a well-rounded person. I based her look on the girl in the music video for Ricky Martin’s “She’s All I Ever Had,” who spends the whole video looking pretty and sad, and that’s about as much as substance as Olivia has in this story. It would take me a couple more years to learn about character development.
This story is noteworthy for being one of my first Nick novels. For the first six months of my fanfic writing career, I wrote almost exclusively Brian stories because he was (and still is) my favorite Backstreet Boy, but I quickly realized that Brian was pretty limiting as a fanfic character. He was too wholesome to get into the kind of trouble that makes for a good story and so attached to Leighanne that it was getting hard to come up with new ways to get rid of her for the sake of writing romance. I’d already put him through heart failure, cancer, a bus crash, a car crash, a plane crash, a drug addiction, and a gunshot wound in my previous stories, and I was running out of bad things to do to him. I began to branch out and start writing more about the other guys. In the summer of 2000, I wrote a story called One Night about AJ having a one-night that has life-shattering consequences: not only does he get the girl pregnant, but she also turns out to be HIV-positive, and, naturally, he gets infected. Then, in the latter part of the year, I wrote my first Nick novel, Cry of Despair, in which a wild night of drinking leads to alcohol poisoning and acute liver failure. As over-the-top as both of these ideas were, they at least seemed semi-plausible when they involved AJ and Nick. I think this is why I came to prefer Nick over Brian as my leading man – Nick’s background and lifestyle just lent itself better to the kind of drama I’ve always loved to write.
Sorry, Nick.
Lol, One Night was the very first fanfic I read, and at first I thought it was real until I got to the part where he held the press conference to announce his HIV status. I also remember the one with Olivia. You made the Carters seem normal; man, I’d kill to have pre-facial tat Aaron back. And yes, now your writing style has improved, the story could use a rewrite.
Aww! I remember the same feeling of confusion when I found the first fanfic I read… I had never heard of fanfic before and had no idea what I was reading. It took me awhile to figure out it was just a fictional story.
LOL I know, the Carters were very normal in Beside the Ocean compared to real life (and later stories). I hadn’t realized how dysfunctional they were yet. I miss pre-facial tat Aaron, too.
Thanks! I’ve learned my lesson about trying to rewrite old stories – it usually doesn’t work out very well – so I will never do it, but I do still like the premise of Beside the Ocean. Maybe I’ll recycle the idea and do something similar in a new story someday.