Wayback Wednesday #3: 2002

Happy New Year! I can’t believe it’s 2020! Crazy!

As we enter a new decade, the twentieth anniversary of Dreamer’s Sanctuary feels even closer.  For this week’s Wayback Wednesday post, I’m going to rearrange the digits in the new year and take you back to 2002 to my beloved soap opera of a collaboration, Code Blue.

Title: Code Blue

Written: December 2001 – May 2007

Straightforward synopsis: It’s like ER, but with the Backstreet Boys! (and *cough*’NSYNC*cough*)

The story behind the story:
While Code Blue was technically started at the tail end of 2001, 2002 is the year I most associate with writing it. 2002 was a slower year for my writing than the previous two had been. Instead of churning out one poorly-written novella a month, I started writing longer, slightly higher-quality stories that took more time to finish. In many ways, Code Blue was a major departure from my previous stories. Sure, it was still a medical drama, but instead of the Boys being patients, they got to be the doctors in this one! This was my first “alternate universe” (AU) story at a time when AU was becoming big in the fandom, thanks to stories like Between the Lines and East Water Convergence. I had never really enjoyed reading AU, but ER was and still is my all-time favorite TV show, so when my first online friend and co-writer, Rachel, came up with the idea for us to collaborate on an ER-like fanfic featuring the Boys as the medical staff, I had to give it a try. Rachel and I had already written two stories together, Fight for Survival and Visions of the Past, so we had a decent track record for collaborations.

We had a lot of fun with the planning process for Code Blue. We knew we would need a ton of characters to fill the hospital, so we came up with some original characters – some inspired by ourselves and our high school crushes, of course! – and also incorporated some other celebrities, like ‘NSYNC and Britney Spears. Neither of us actually liked ‘NSYNC or Britney, but writing BSB/’NSYNC crossovers was kind of trendy at the time, and we figured it was a good way to make fun of them. Justin and Britney were a couple at the time, so it only made sense to include her, too.

We also knew we would need a lot of patients, and we invited our readers to create and submit their own characters for this purpose. We used a lot of them, and somewhere I still have a database of all the submissions we didn’t get around to. I guess this is where my practice of giving readers “cameos” in my stories started because it’s something I’ve done on my own ever since.

I was really into the idea of making Code Blue seem more like an episodic “show” than a typical fanfic, so I built a website just for the story, separate from Dreamer’s Sanctuary. It still exists in pretty much its original form. I even created the Flash intro on the splash page as “opening credits” for the story. This was fairly early on in the Flash phase I went through around this time, when I learned just enough to make basic animations like this, which I thought were so cool. I was also in a songwriting phase and had also gotten an electric keyboard for my birthday that year, so I composed and recorded the theme music myself.

As far as writing the actual story went, Rachel and I started off on a roll. If I remember correctly, we churned out the first few episodes pretty quickly, but eventually, things slowed down. We started to run into some conflict with each other. Rachel was starting to lose interest in BSB and fanfic, and I would get annoyed with her for taking too long to write her parts or wanting to focus more on her own original characters than the Boys. Then Rachel asked if another writer, Ashley, could join us. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I agreed to let Ashley write with us. This was the beginning of the end for our collaboration partnership. Three is a crowd, and we never really worked as a trio. Needless to say, there was a lot of drama during this time.

In an effort to give Ashley more ownership over the story, we got the bright idea to go back and rewrite it from the beginning so we could make it even better. This turned out to be a huge mistake. Revising is important, but rewriting a story from scratch that already has fifteen chapters posted online is a terrible idea. We started out strong with the best of intentions, but rewriting turned out to be tedious, painstaking, uninspiring work, and we quickly ran out of steam. After months without updating, Rachel and Ashley decided to move on, leaving me wondering what to do with this project that seemed too big and overwhelming to continue on my own.

In the meantime, I had become good friends with another writer, Bianca, so I recruited her to take Rachel’s place as co-writer of Code Blue. It took us two years to finish rewriting it and catch up to the place where Rachel and I had left off; we did it, but by that time, we were both over it. It was 2005 by then; I was in the middle of writing By My Side and really didn’t have much interest in Code Blue anymore, other than not wanting to officially throw in the towel and call it discontinued.

Finally, the following year, we decided to recruit some more writers to see if we could get reinspired and also lighten our workload. We took applications for writers to join “The Code Team” and ended up with seven more collaborators. Oddly enough, most of them were people I didn’t really know before they applied to work on Code Blue, other than having received feedback from some of them. Many of them became friends of mine, most notably Rose, who became a repeat co-writer and one of my best friends.

Writing with such a large group of people was a gamble: It could have been a total disaster, but it actually worked out well for a while. We had a good group of writers who were talented, full of ideas, eager to contribute, and not interested in the kind of drama that had come between Rachel, Ashley, and me. We wrote five more episodes together over the next year, but eventually, the Code Team fizzled out, too. We never had a falling out or anything dramatic; people just sort of started disappearing, and we stopped updating in 2007.

It took me a long time to finally change the status of the story from “incomplete” to “discontinued” on my site because I kept hoping at least some of us would come back together and update it again someday, but eventually I gave up on that idea. If I truly wanted to continue it, I could do so on my own, but as much as I hate to admit it, the truth is that my heart isn’t into anymore either.

Still, I learned a lot from writing Code Blue. This was the first story I ever put effort into planning, outlining, and researching for. It was the first big collaboration I ever participated in, let alone organized. It was the first time I learned that three is a crowd when it comes to co-writing, although it would not be the last. It was also the first “published” story I ever took down to rewrite and repost – and it will be the last.

Was it worth all the drama along the way? Absolutely. For the most part, I really did have fun planning and writing this story, as well as working on its website, and I made a great friend because of it. That alone makes it worth it, and it’s why I decided to feature Code Blue in this post instead of other stories from this period. For me, it is definitely the most memorable.