New Year’s Eve Reflections

Happy New Year!  Unfortunately, I don’t have any story updates today.  The next chapter of My Brother’s Keeper is almost done, as are our edits for the last old 00Carter episode, “Catch Her If You Can,” but neither are quite ready to post just yet.  For my last post of 2021, I just wrote a blog about my writing.

The second line of my current novel says, “I guess everyone gets a little reflective on New Year’s Eve, and I was no exception.”  The first line of Chapter 74 of Curtain Call is also “I guess everyone gets a little reflective on New Year’s Eve.”  Weird how Kevin and Nick think alike, huh? LOL

In spite of writing this same sentence at least twice in the last ten years, I am not the type to get super reflective on New Year’s Eve.  It’s not one of my favorite holidays.  I’m not big on resolutions either.  But, nevertheless, I found myself feeling “a little reflective” this week as I finally delved back into fanfic after a busy start to my winter break.

I worked mostly on 00Carter this month, editing old episodes and finishing my last part for one of the new ones.  Of the few of you who will read this blog, there are even fewer who will read 00Carter.  I get it.  I’ve always admitted that if I were not one of its writers, I would probably not read 00Carter either for a multitude of reasons.  It’s about secret agents, which is not my thing.  It’s also AU, which I don’t enjoy as much as canon BSB fics.  It was on hiatus for nine years and is unlikely to ever be labeled “complete,” which would make me hesitant to click on it.  But I would be missing out because, in my not-so-humble-or-unbiased opinion, 00Carter is a gem of a story.  It was always a lot of fun, but our recent edits have raised the overall quality of the writing from good to great and reminded me just how much I enjoy it.  If you haven’t read it, I really hope you’ll give it a try!  It’s definitely different from most of my other stories, but that’s one of the reasons I love writing it.  It’s lighthearted, which is a nice break from the heavy drama of most of my other novels, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

But the point of this blog is not to promote 00Carter.  I’m not sure it even has a “point” besides being reflective.  There is no big announcement at the end of this post and no new story chapter to accompany it.  It’s really just me putting some thoughts about my writing into words before the end of the year.  I doubt anyone else will even want to read them, but my personal website seemed like the best place to put them, since they’re at least relevant to the work posted here.

While revisiting 00Carter this past year, I realized I’ve entered into a new chapter as a writer.  For a long time, I divided my fanfic “career” into two eras:  before Broken and after Broken.  Broken has always represented a pivotal point in my writing journey.  It was the first story that really took off for me and attracted a lot of new readers, and it taught me so much about writing.  You can literally see the growth I made from the first chapter to the last.  Its sequel, By My Side, continued that growth and turned me into the writer I am today.  Or, at least, that’s what I thought.  There was a time when I wasn’t sure I could ever top Broken and BMS, which felt like the peak of my fanfic “career.”  I still consider that series my “magnum opus” in many ways, but it’s not my best work anymore and doesn’t really reflect the writer I am now, almost nineteen years after starting Broken and fourteen years after finishing By My Side.  (Seriously, how has it been that long??)

Looking back, I would now divide my fanfic “career” into four chapters.  Chapter 1 was the beginning, the pre-Broken era, which lasted from late 1999 to the end of 2002.  This is when I first started writing as a hobby.  I was very prolific during this period, churning out a new “novel” almost every month (which, judging by word count, were mostly just novellas or short stories broken up in multiple parts), over a dozen short stories, and a handful of collaborations with varying degrees of success.  It was definitely “quantity over quality” back in those days.  That wasn’t my goal; I did the best I could to come up with good stories, but I was still a kid, and my writing reflects that inexperience and immaturity.

Chapter 2 was the Broken era, which went from January 2003 to January 2008, when I finished By My Side.  This chapter took me from my last semester of high school to halfway through my first year of teaching and included four years of college, a time of tremendous personal growth.  As I’ve already said, it was a time of tremendous growth for me as a writer, too.  During that era, I went from a teenybopper beginning writer who had some good ideas but didn’t know how to deliver them to a young adult writer who had a better handle on character development and description but suffered from the occasional bout of purple prose.

On the back half of the Broken era came Chapter 3, which I’m calling the Absolute Chaos era.  It technically started around the beginning of 2007 with 00Carter and ran until at least the summer of 2017, when I finished Sick as My Secrets.  This was a time when Absolute Chaos was the place to go to read, post, and discuss BSB fanfic.  Through the forum there, I made new friends and found new favorite fanfic writers and collaborators.  I also learned a lot as I continued to develop my own writing.  During this era, I really tried to make myself a more well-rounded writer by branching out from my medical drama/het romance roots and delving into other genres, including action, comedy, mystery, horror, slash, and alternate universe.  Sure, most of the novels I wrote were still medical dramas, but with the exception of Curtain Call (clearly, I couldn’t resist writing another Nick cancer story), they all had some sort of twist that set them apart from my earlier “sickfics.”  I also got back into writing short stories, but unlike the sappy one-shots I wrote in the beginning, these were mostly dark comedies and quirky forum challenge entries.  Between 00Carter, The Pandaskunk Saga, and the AC fairy tale challenge, I certainly improved my parody skills during this period.  This was the first chapter in which I was a full-fledged adult, and there were times when “adulting” got in the way of fangirling.  My writing definitely slowed down during this period, but it became more about quality over quantity.

That brings me to the current chapter of my writing journey, which I don’t really have a name for yet.  I could call Chapter 4 the pandemic era, but technically it began way before COVID with A Heart That Isn’t Mine, which I started in the summer of 2018.  This new chapter followed the brief hiatus I took after finishing Sick as My Secrets and struggling to get started on a new project.  I didn’t write much in the year between SAMS and AHTIM.  By the time I was ready to start posting AHTIM, reviews had been disabled on Absolute Chaos due to a spam problem, and many readers and writers had moved on from the fanfic community or the BSB fandom altogether.  I’m not sure if it’s because of the decreased readership and feedback or simply the result of maturity, but this is when I really learned to write for myself.  Obviously, I don’t write solely for myself, or I wouldn’t post my work online for other people to read.  But over the past few years, I’ve gotten to the point where I can just enjoy my own stories without aiming to please anyone else.  Feedback is the icing on the cake for me.  I love it, but I don’t live for it.  When I don’t get any after an update, it’s a little disappointing but not discouraging.  I’ve become the kind of writer who’s confident and passionate enough to keep writing for the love of it even when it feels like no one is reading.  Writing for myself has given me more freedom and courage to take risks and write whatever I want to write, whether it’s intense medical drama, sweet bromance, or crazy comedy.  Some of the stuff I’ve written during this period has been depressing, some of it depraved, and some downright silly, but I’ve sure had a lot of fun doing it.  It’s given me an outlet during times of personal grief and the current pandemic, and it’s helped me rediscover my passion for writing as I continue to hone the craft of it.  I’ve also found a better balance between my personal and professional lives so that I can make more time for my hobby and update more regularly.

As we head into another new year, I look forward to continuing 00Carter and finishing My Brother’s Keeper.  I appreciate everyone who visits this site and reads my stories, especially anyone who’s actually still reading this long-winded blog.  I wish you all a happy new year!  2021 has been hard, and I’m not at all sad to leave it behind.  Here’s to a better 2022 and (hopefully) the Backstreet Boys’ long-awaited return to the stage!