I made it!

I’m really coming down to the wire here, but I [just barely] managed to deliver an update today!  As I mentioned last week, I’ve finally caught up to myself, despite writing every day, and no longer have a buffer of chapters stored.  I finally finished drafting Chapter 37 of The World Will Be Waiting last night and literally just finished editing it before I started writing this post.  I hate feeling rushed, but I want to stick with my weekly updates for as long as I can.  Judging by how long my chapters have gotten and how long it takes me to write one, this may well be the last week I can.  With that being said, Chapter 37 is up!  This chapter focuses on Kevin’s comeback performance on Good Morning America, which you can watch here.

The nice part of having posted everything I’ve written for this story is that it’s a good time to get feedback from readers to help me move forward.  I hit the 200k word mark yesterday, which means the story is already getting close to the same length as its predecessor, My Brother’s Keeper.  Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near being finished.  I am plantsing this story, which means partly planning and partly flying by the seat of my pants.  I’ve always had a rough outline that includes a combination of real events that happened during this BSB era and fictional ideas I want to see happen, but I’ve also left myself plenty of room to take creative liberties as other ideas come to me.  As of right now, I’m planning to take the story into 2014 and through at least part of the In a World Like This tour.  The Boys aren’t even done with the album yet at this point in the story (August 2012), so I clearly have quite a ways to go!  Writing this sequel has helped me remember how By My Side got to be so long. 🙃

My question for those reading is this:  What would you like to read about?  If there are specific real life events and moments from the guys’ personal or professional lives that you would like to see me include in the story, please let me know!  Or if you have ideas for the fictional parts of the story, I’m open to those, too!  Feel free to leave a comment below or contact me however you feel most comfortable.  I would love to hear your thoughts!

Part of the reason I took longer than expected to finish Chapter 37 is that I got distracted by another fanfic-related passion project this week.  This one has to do with one of my very old stories, Code Blue!  I discovered a few months ago that the Code Blue website wasn’t working correctly anymore, at least not on Chrome.  I created the site on Microsoft Word in 2001 and hadn’t updated it since 2007, so it was very outdated.  Unfortunately, its layout used frames, which apparently are no longer supported in modern web browsers, and none of the links in the navigation menu would open in the main frame as intended.  I still have all the files for the website, so I thought it would be fairly easy for me to go back in and change the layout to remove the frames.  Unfortunately, I have a newer computer now, and the files weren’t working well with the newer version of Word.  After trying several different ways of editing them, none of which worked well, I finally decided to recreate the site on WordPress, which is what I now use for my main site.

This little project took more time than I meant for it to, but it was a labor of love.  Although Code Blue is discontinued, it will always have a special place in my heart.  It was my first big AU collaboration, which helped to pave the way for 00Carter and Song for the Undead, and the first of my own fanfics that I was completely obsessed with for a time.  It was so much fun to plan and write, at least in the beginning, but like most of my collaborations, the enthusiasm for it eventually fizzled out.  I have never really revisited the story itself since it was last updated, but I had fun rereading bits and pieces as I ran it through the spelling and grammar check on Google Docs to find and fix all the typos we’d missed before reposting each episode.  I typically don’t recommend reading discontinued stories, but Code Blue actually has a lot of content to enjoy.  There are 21 finished episodes that add up to a combined total of over 200k words and more than 500 pages.  And while there are certainly some cringey moments, there are also some great characters and storylines that I had completely forgotten about.  As far as writing quality goes, Code Blue was a transitional story for me.  I co-wrote it around the same time as I wrote the Broken series, so my writing style is about the same as those stories – better than the stuff I wrote as a beginner but not quite on par with the way I write now.  While I haven’t heard from most of my co-writers in many years and don’t have any real interest in continuing it by myself, I still have a love for it that made it worth my time.  For nostalgia’s sake, I kept the new site looking similar to the old one, and the content is the same aside from me removing the features that no longer worked, like the chatroom and guestbook.  I also updated the photo on the front page of the guys in scrubs because 1) my photoshopping skills are a little better now than they were in 2001, and 2) it was fun to do!  If you’ve never read Code Blue before, I hope you’ll consider checking it out!  For anyone wondering, this story is linked on my Archive site with my other really old content because of its age and the fact that it’s been discontinued.

I hope to be back with a new chapter of TWWBW next week, but I make no promises.  Thanks for bearing with me.  I look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas!