Happy Birthday, Nick!

I love when my update day falls on a Backstreet Boy’s birthday. Happy birthday, Nick! 42 was full of highs and lows, but I hope there’s nothing but highs ahead for 43!

Not only is today Nick’s birthday, but it’s also an anniversary here at Dreamer’s Sanctuary. Twenty years ago today, I posted the first chapter of Broken. I can’t believe it’s been that long or that I’m this old, but yeah… my “baby” is twenty!

I’ve already written blogs on the significance Broken and its sequel By My Side had in introducing people to my writing and molding me into the writer I am today, so I won’t go too deep into all that again here. I reread both novels three years ago when I was writing the retrospective blogs for my site’s twentieth anniversary, and while they are definitely a product of the time and my age when I wrote them and don’t reflect my current writing style anymore, I really enjoyed revisiting them. Broken Nick and Claire are still my favorite couple from any of my fanfics, and their stories will always have a special place in my heart.

My writing has certainly evolved in the twenty years since I started Broken, but the lessons I learned while writing it and its sequel continue to have a lasting impact on me now. I’ve been thinking about these stories a lot lately as I write The World Will Be Waiting because it has the same themes of trying to move on after a traumatic, life-altering experience and navigating a career and a new relationship with a physical disability. I doubt I would have written this story or its predecessor, My Brother’s Keeper, had it not been for Broken and BMS. They definitely paved the way by giving me the confidence to tackle the topics these stories explore. I’ve said it to myself before, but Broken Nick learned to walk again so that Quadriplegic Kevin could roll. LOL

It’s fitting that I’m posting Chapter 17 of The World Will Be Waiting today, on Broken’s anniversary, not only because Chapter 17 was an important chapter in Broken, but because I also drew some inspiration from By My Side when I wrote it. This chapter contains the first sex scene of the story. I will be the first to admit that I am not a smut writer; I don’t write sex scenes very often and still find them awkward when I do. (I will also admit I left a really cringey sentence in this chapter specifically because it made me giggle every time I reread it – I’ll leave you to figure out which one it was.) But I knew going into this story that I would have to include some because Kevin rediscovering his sexuality seemed like such an important part of the overall plot. And I knew this because the same was true for Nick in BMS.

I was only eighteen years old when I finished Broken and started writing BMS. I had gradually moved from reading fairly PG-13 teenybopper fanfics to more mature romance fics that included detailed sex scenes. As I made my initial outline for BMS, I remember thinking, I want to try writing a sex scene at some point, but it won’t be for this story. Having come across the term “devotee” in my research, I was hesitant to write my first ever sex scene with an amputee character, I guess because I worried it would come across as fetishy. Of course, as I’ve since learned, whenever I vow I’ll never do something, I will inevitably do it at some point down the road. I did eventually write my first sex scene – three of them, if I remember correctly – in BMS because it felt too important to gloss over in a story about a guy with one leg learning to love himself again as he found love with a woman. Getting over that hurdle helped me gain the confidence to keep writing scenes like that when they seem necessary for the story I want to tell instead of always “fading to black” like I had prior to BMS. So thank you, Broken Nick, for continuing to inspire me all these years later.

Just for fun, I leave you with these screenshots from my Sims 4 game of Nick and Claire loving life and Kevin and Natalie… falling in love? ❤️  Thanks for following my characters, old and new, over the years!