Wayback Wednesday #17: 2016

I hope everyone’s staying healthy and hanging in there!

Have you voted in the polls for Round 1 of the Dreamer’s Sanctuary 20th Anniversary Story Tournament? If not, what are you waiting for?  Click here to cast your votes!  I changed the set-up a bit since I originally posted this on Monday to spread the polls out across four pages instead of having all sixteen on the same page because I noticed some of them weren’t loading when they were trying to do it all at the same time.  If you have any trouble getting them to load still, try refreshing the page – that has always worked for me.  You don’t have to vote in every poll, either; you can pick the ones with stories you’ve read and vote for those. The polls for Round 1 will be open the rest of this week, and Round 2 will begin on Monday.

This week, we’re going back to 2016 to talk about Sick as My Secrets. About time, right? I’ve been waiting a while to get to this one! I actually started writing this story in 2013 and began posting it in 2014, but I chose to wait until this week to blog about it because it’s literally the only story I updated in 2016. Much like Broken a decade earlier, SAMS was written during a busy time of change in my life. In the almost four years it took me to write this story, I started and finished a three-year master’s degree program and bought my first home, both of which came with more responsibilities. Between taking classes and taking care of the new house on top of working full time, my writing time decreased significantly and my updates slowed down. That’s why SAMS took me so long to write and why I wasn’t writing much else (fanfic, anyway) at the time. I’m grateful I had this story to keep me going during this period because, without it, it would have been easy to walk away from fanfic for a while, and for all I know, I may not have wanted to come back. I’m glad I did!

Title: Sick as My Secrets

Written: February 2014 – June 2017

Straightforward synopsis: Weeks after hooking up on the BSB cruise, Howie and Nick discover they are both infected with HIV, and their relationship changes forever.

The story behind the story:
I talked a few weeks ago about the writing challenges on Absolute Chaos, which spawned several of my short stories, including Shorty and the Deceased, Beauty and the Backstreet Boy, Hybrid, and Watch Me as I Bleed. AC also used to have a summer reading challenge, in which participants were challenged to read a story they’d never read before, ideally one that they may not have read otherwise, and provide feedback for the writer.

In 2013, the theme of the challenge was “Hidden Gems.” Participants submitted at least one of their own stories that they considered undiscovered or underrated and deserving of being read. In return, they had to choose two stories by other writers to read and review. One of the stories I read that summer was a short story called Crash and Burn by Cinzia (“mamogirl” on AC). Like me, Cinzia is a Brian girl who loves angst, which made me interested in checking out her work. Unlike me, Cinzia writes mostly slash.

Slash has never been my cup of tea as a reader or a writer. To be clear, this has nothing to do with homophobia. I have gay friends and family members, and I support equal rights for everyone. My problem with slash in the BSB fandom has always been suspension of disbelief. In the past, I had a hard time taking slash stories seriously because, as far as we know, all five of the Boys are straight, so reading stories about them loving each other in anything more than a bromantic way seemed weird to me. I mean no offense to people who love slash. To each their own! I’m sure the type of story I enjoy reading and writing seems weird to plenty of people, too. All I’m trying to say is that I never really understood the whole slash phenomenon.

That’s exactly why I picked one of Cinzia’s stories to read for the challenge. I wanted to see if I could take it seriously and suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it. Having said that, I’m not sure Crash and Burn even qualifies as a slash because there’s no sex or even kissing in it, nothing more intimate than a hug between Brian and Nick. But either way, I enjoyed it! Cinzia’s a great writer, and from what I’ve read of her stories, she keeps it classy, without resorting to the kind of crude descriptions or silly pet names that had turned me off to the slash stories I’d tried in the past. Reading her story made me more open to reading slash in the future.

I didn’t think much about trying to write slash myself until later that summer, after seeing an interview Nick and Howie did during the promo for In a World Like This where they were teasing Howie about being fixated on Nick’s pubic hair. It’s a hilarious moment in an otherwise pretty lame interview. Howie’s reaction – the uncomfortable laughter, the defensive reply of “I said I’m married!” – was enough to make me wonder, What if?? I thought to myself, If any of the Backstreet Boys were gay, it would totally be those two. That little nugget was enough to get the wheels spinning in my head, and I decided to give myself another challenge. The challenge was to see if I could write a slash story, take it seriously, and make it at least semi-believable.

I knew it would be best to start small with a short story, so I came up with the idea for Unsuspecting Sunday, in which Nick and Howie get drunk on the BSB cruise and end up hooking up, then regretting it the next day. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Howie as a closeted gay man who had secretly developed romantic feelings for Nick. I had a much harder time convincing myself that Nick could feel the same way about Howie or would ever act on those feelings, which is why I knew I had to get him wasted first and lower his inhibitions. This gives the story a bit of a rapey vibe, but that only adds to the drama later.

I was still contemplating the idea of writing Unsuspecting Sunday when my warped mind took things a step further (some might argue a step too far) and thought, Ooh, what if one of them was HIV-positive and didn’t know, and he infected the other one?! I apologize for this thought because it seems so stereotypical. Please understand that I don’t think all gay men are infected with HIV or that HIV/AIDS is just a problem in the gay community. It’s not 1982. Nonetheless, once that thought popped into my brain, there was no going back. I had basically the same conversation in my head as I did when I got the idea to chop Nick’s leg off in Broken. OMG, that’s horrible; I can’t do that… but damn, it would be so delightfully dramatic if I did! I have since learned that the ideas that give me that kind of reaction are often the best ones and that I should just go for it. So… I did!

I decided to try writing the short story first and, if that went well, leave it open for a longer sequel in which I could tackle the HIV storyline. Writing Unsuspecting Sunday was an interesting experience. I started it in third person point of view because it’s what I’m most used to writing, but I quickly realized that it would get confusing trying to figure out who was doing what if I could only use male pronouns. Rather than risk that confusion or have to use Howie and Nick’s names all the time, I decided to switch to first person point of view. This was the right decision and definitely made it much easier to write. I still got the giggles when it came time to write the sex scene, if you can even call it that. I ended the scene before they went all the way, and in my mind, all that really happened was foreplay and a blow job because I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to imagine even drunk Nick letting Howie get away with any more than that at that point in their relationship.

You guys know I try to keep my medical info as accurate as I can, so I will just go ahead and admit right now that I took some creative liberties in how I had Nick contract the virus. Having it be transmitted through basically just a blow job is pretty far-fetched. In fact, I couldn’t find a single case of HIV infection that was confirmed to have come from oral sex alone. But just because it’s never been documented doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I made the conscious choice to mention Nick biting down on Howie’s tongue and drawing blood to make that remote possibility seem more plausible later on.

There was a lot of speculation among readers early on in Sick as My Secrets about who infected whom. Most people assumed Nick had infected Howie, but it was the other way around. The back story that I wrote into SAMS was that Howie had hooked up with a guy once before, a man he met at a gay club in London, and that’s when he got infected. Without knowing he had the virus, he went on to infect his wife Leigh, who unknowingly passed it to their baby through breastfeeding. Of course, I had to go with the most dramatic, horrific way for Howie to find out his own status, which was to have little Holden “Plot Device” Dorough get sick enough to be diagnosed first. I have a “no killing real BSB kids” policy, so I knew I wasn’t going to let Holden die, but still, giving Howie’s baby AIDS was definitely putting a toe on the line of what I consider to be going too far in a fanfic. Anyway, the fact that Leigh and Holden were also infected helped to establish the timeline of how the virus had spread and in what order. Howie had to have been infected long before the cruise for Holden’s immune system to be weakened to the point of contracting pneumocystis pneumonia, an AIDS-defining illness, at the beginning of SAMS.

I should also mention that this isn’t the first time I’ve used this sort of storyline. Unintentionally, I’ve started “recycling” old storylines in recent years, using the same topics as stories I wrote at the beginning of my fanfic career, but putting fresh spins on them and writing them a lot better. Before Broken and Curtain Call, there was Don’t Wanna Lose You Now. Before Secrets of the Heart and A Heart That Isn’t Mine, there was Heartache. And before Sick as My Secrets, there was One Night, which was about AJ having a one-night stand with a woman who turns out to be HIV-positive. Of course, she infects him, and he gets her pregnant. Talk about drama! SAMS is like the slash version of that story, only better written.

Going back to Unsuspecting Sunday for a moment, here’s a fun fact for you. I set it during the 2013 cruise, but wrote it a couple of months before the actual cruise took place. The themes for the deck parties hadn’t been announced yet, but I knew that the second night on the previous two cruises had been a formal night, so that’s what I went with in describing Nick and Howie’s clothes. Then the second night turned out to be a Halloween party where Boys dressed up as the Village People, so I went back after the fact, edited the story to include Howie’s Indian costume and Nick’s construction worker clothes, and re-posted it. I rarely make changes to a story that’s already been posted beyond correcting typos, but I’m anal when it comes to attention to detail, and it bothered me that their outfits were inaccurate.

My favorite part to write was the morning after. Nick’s rage… Howie’s regret… ooh, it was so much fun to write! I think that’s what convinced me to go ahead with the novel. Imagining Nick’s reaction when he found out Howie had infected him with HIV got my drama juices flowing, and I knew I had to go there.

I really enjoyed writing Sick as My Secrets. I said early on that this story was going to be so angsty and dramatic, it would make Curtain Call seem like a romantic comedy. In the beginning, I didn’t see how I could even include comic relief in a story where both main characters and a baby have HIV, but of course, I managed to write some more light-hearted stuff in there, too, especially in the latter half of the story when Howie and Nick are a couple.

I didn’t originally know if I was going to have them get together romantically or decide to remain just friends. Like with Curtain Call, I decided not to force anything and let the characters guide the direction of the story. I wrote in my Curtain Call blog about how I felt Nick and Cary’s relationship was a bit one-sided; she loved him more than he loved her. I ended up feeling similarly about Nick and Howie in this story. I bought in to the idea that Howie could be gay and had been hiding it his whole life because of his Catholic upbringing, so it wasn’t that hard to imagine him falling in love with Nick. I had a much harder time having Nick fall for Howie, and although I do think his love for Howie was genuine, I always envisioned him going back to Lauren in the end.

I have never really enjoyed writing about the Boys’ wives or families, but I love Nick and Lauren together, and I loved Lauren’s character in this story. The dynamic of her and Nick being a mixed-status couple was interesting, and subplot of Nick’s fear of infecting her ruining their relationship was one of my favorite parts to write. I liked writing about Leigh as well and showing the different way each woman reacted to finding out her partner was HIV-positive. Lauren was surprisingly understanding and nothing but supportive of Nick, while Leigh was understandably so upset and hurt by Howie’s betrayal that she left him.

I decided fairly early on that SAMS was a tragedy and should have a tragic ending. I’m sure I contemplated killing Nick at one point or another, but it quickly became clear that Howie was the one who needed to die. (Consider this an honor, Howie; I only hurt/kill the ones I love. This story is a sign of how much you’ve grown on me over the years!) Initially, I assumed I would just have him develop AIDS and die of AIDS-related complications. But as I said before, it’s not 1982 anymore, and this was more difficult to make happen realistically than I had realized.

Doing research on HIV for this story gave me such an appreciation for how far medical science has come since the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Prior to writing this story, most of what I knew about HIV came from three sources: 1) school, which mostly just focuses on how it’s transmitted; 2) ER, mainly Jeannie Boulet’s storyline from the mid-’90s, and 3) Lurlene McDaniel books (of course). The two Lurlene McDaniel books that revolved around HIV were Sixteen and Dying, published in 1992, and Baby Alicia Is Dying, published in 1993. Notice both of them contain the word “Dying” in the title. That’s because, even in the early ‘90s, an HIV diagnosis was still considered a death sentence. There was a huge disconnect between the current research I was reading and the books, movies, and documentaries I was reading/watching for inspiration and out of interest while writing this story, most of which focused on the early days of the AIDS epidemic. (For those interested in learning more from a historical standpoint, I highly recommend And the Band Played On, both the book and the movie. Heartbreaking, but also morbidly fascinating. The documentary We Were Here is also really good.) The antiretroviral therapy that’s standard today wasn’t used until 1997, so anything from before then is obviously very outdated. I knew there were better drugs available to manage HIV nowadays, but didn’t realize that the life expectancy of a person being treated for HIV is close to that of someone without the virus. It’s considered a chronic condition these days, not necessarily a terminal one.

All that being said, I realized it wasn’t realistic to just have Howie’s condition worsen on its own without a reason. So I thought of having him overdose, leading to liver failure, which would ultimately kill him because they would never give someone who’s suicidal and HIV-positive undergo a liver transplant, right? Wrong! A little more research revealed that people with HIV can receive organ transplants – and so can people who have attempted suicide, for that matter. I really didn’t want to write the whole liver transplant storyline – been there, done that – but I figured it would give me a way to have Howie develop AIDS later. After all, organ recipients have to take anti-rejection drugs, which suppress their immune system. In theory, this would allow the HIV to replicate unchecked, leading to a weaker immune system and higher risk of opportunistic infections, right? Wrong again! In researching this, I found out that, for reasons I can’t fully explain without looking it up again, it doesn’t work that way, which is why people with HIV can safely undergo organ transplants. The way I ultimately manufactured Howie’s death made sense in my mind, but according to my research, it really was a bit of a stretch. Call it “creative liberties” again or just a case of bad luck, as Backstreet Boys tend to have in my fanfics.

My only real regret with this story is Howie’s actual death scene. Originally, there wasn’t going to be a death scene at all. I was going to have Nick get awoken by a phone call from the hospital, letting him know Howie had passed while he was sleeping at home, and be filled with regret that he wasn’t there to say goodbye. It was going to be tasteful and simple, yet still heartbreaking. The reason it didn’t happen that way has everything to do with my own analness and attention to detail.

Days before I was due to write Chapter 80, I got the idea to start the Epilogue with “twelve days, four hours, twenty minutes,” a lyric from the song “Sick as My Secrets.” I wanted the rocket launch in the epilogue to take place exactly that long after Howie’s death. In counting back from the date and time of the launch (which was real because, as I’ve already stated, I am just that anal), I realized it would put Howie’s time of death in the middle of the night. I had envisioned Nick, the other guys, and Howie’s family keeping a round-the-clock vigil at his bedside, but it made the most sense for Nick, as his partner, to be the one spending at night, leaving the day shifts for those with kids and families to take care of. This meant that Nick would be there to witness Howie’s death. I’m sure I could have found some way to get Nick out of Howie’s room for the night or even just an hour, but I didn’t. I changed my plan and wrote a detailed, drawn-out death scene, which I don’t like… not because it’s bad, but just because it’s too damn sad, even for me. I can’t even bring myself to read it because it bothers me so much. If I could go back and do things differently, I would stick with my original plan and let Howie pass away peacefully “off-screen.” That being said, I did get the idea for my next novel, A Heart That Isn’t Mine, by changing my plan, so I guess it was worth it. More on that in a few weeks.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I have never been a slash fan, but writing Unsuspecting Sunday and Sick as My Secrets made me much more open-minded about slash. I actually understand the appeal of them now. It was nice to be able to write romance without having to create an original character; I could keep the focus on the guys that way. I don’t necessarily see myself writing another slash anytime soon because I feel like I put everything I had into developing Nick and Howie’s relationship in these two stories, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility down the road either. If I came up with an idea that inspired me, I would absolutely write another slash. I’m a lot more open to reading them now, too. I don’t seek them out, but I also don’t avoid a story just because it has that slash label. In that respect, SAMS made me a more well-rounded writer and reader.