Happy April! For my first of the two Throwback Thursday blogs I have planned for this month, I’m going to take a break from blogging about my fanfics to focus on an April staple here at Dreamer’s Sanctuary: my annual April Fools’ Day prank! For the past twenty-five years, without fail, I’ve posted something for April Fools’ Day. Some years, I spend weeks working on these pranks, while other years (like this year), they come together at the eleventh hour. Sometimes they’re funny, and sometimes they’re lame. To be honest, the pressure I put on myself to deliver something and keep the tradition alive usually stresses me out, to the point that I almost threw in the towel this year and announced that I was letting go of this tradition and leaving it in the past. But I ended up pulling something out of my ass at the last minute, like I often do, so the tradition lives on. Here are my top five favorite April Fools’ Day pranks from the last twenty-five years!
5. Into the Millennium
Changing my site’s layout is something I’ve done several times for April Fools’ Day. In 2002, I changed my BSB layout to an NSYNC layout and announced that I would be switching to writing NSYNC fanfic instead. In 2018, I did the same thing with Dream to show my “support” for Melissa Schuman. In 2006, after a girl named Tanja plagiarized a bunch of BSB fics and changed the Boys’ names to members of the defunct British boy band Busted, I pretended she had hacked my site and changed the layout to Busted. But my favorite fake layout is from 2015. For my site’s 15th anniversary, I created a throwback layout that resembled Dreamer’s Sanctuary in 2000, complete with tacky tiled backgrounds, brightly-colored Comic Sans font, corny ‘90s BSB pics, old-school animated gifs, and obnoxious midi songs playing in the background of each page. (The midis may not play anymore on modern internet browsers, but I was able to get them to work on some pages by removing the “S” in the “https” of the page URL in Chrome on my computer.) I had a ton of fun trying to recreate the original look of the site. Some pages may be slightly exaggerated, but others are spot on! It always makes me smile to click through the pages, which is why this prank comes in at number five.
4. Dodging the Daylight
From fake chapters to full fics, many of my April Fools pranks involve writing. In 2012, I mocked my proclivity for writing Nick cancer stories by debuting a new story called Half the Man I Used to Be, in which Nick is diagnosed with testicular cancer, loses his balls, and receives a testicular transplant from a transgender woman. In 2013, I wrote Behind the Curtain, a one-shot companion piece to Curtain Call, in which Nick comes back from the dead as a zombie. In 2021, I created Come Find Me, an audiofic that expressed my horror over a cringy political tweet of Brian’s. I’ve even teased fake stories that I never actually wrote, such as 2020’s Sharkolas and 2024’s Frick and Frack’s Fuck Fiesta. But my favorite April Fools fic is Dodging the Daylight, a short story I wrote in 2022 about Brian’s battle with skin cancer. This was one of the rare times when I got an idea months in advance and actually had time to devote to doing it well, which is probably why it’s one of my favorites. The idea came from a September 2021 article about the Boys’ skincare routines, in which Brian shared that he’s had several cancerous spots removed from his body. While the word “cancer” is certainly scary, most types of skin cancer are highly treatable, and having cancerous moles removed is a pretty routine procedure, so I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. But the dramatic reaction from some fans gave me the idea to write a really melodramatic Brian cancer story, Broken-style. Almost twenty years after writing Broken, I had fun spoofing it, from its many cheesy tropes to some of its most memorable scenes. Unlike many of my pranks, Dodging the Daylight is not a super obvious joke. Because it’s actually a complete story, it’s more subtle than some of my other joke fics. But by the time Broken Nick showed up and started razzing Brian for being dramatic about his .1% chance of dying from basal cell carcinoma, I hope it had become apparent to readers that it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
3. Frontage Road Fellas
Fake announcements are also a staple of my April Fools pranks. For my very first one back in 2001, I announced that I was shutting down Dreamer’s Sanctuary. Since then, I’ve also claimed that I was being sued by the Boys’ lawyers, moving my fanfic to Twitter, putting my work behind a paywall, creating a separate site for slash fics, and battling Nick Plague (which was not a total joke). But the best was in 2023, when I announced my transition from writing Backstreet Boys fanfiction to writing original works about a fictional boy band, the Frontage Road Fellas! I had fun coming up with the totally original names of the five members: Bartholomew John “BJ” McClean, Dickolas “Dick” Garter, Herbert “Herbie” Dorito, Richard Kevinson, and Bryan Lyttrell. (Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, was purely coincidental.) I even used find and replace to change the characters’ names in the new chapter of my work in progress, The World Will Be Waiting, which I also posted that way for April Fools’ Day.
2. Angstaholic
Most of my pranks are a product of their time. Take one of my favorites that fell just outside the top five: my fake Angelfire error pages from 2004. My site was never actually hosted on Angelfire (Geocities all the way, baby!), but the Angelfire 504 error pages were more iconic at the time, so I made a series of fake ones with funny error messages, many of them related to the fandom or inside jokes I shared with online friends at the time, and set up a javascript to load a different one with each click (which, surprisingly, still works 21 years later!) Most of them wouldn’t be funny to people today who don’t understand the context of the jokes, but they’re a fun throwback for me. My 2019 prank will probably stand the test of time better, as it relates to my whole history as a BSB fanfic writer, but it was definitely a fitting one for the year I did it. It came from a place of real guilt and insecurity I was feeling over the disturbing content of the novel I was writing at the time, A Heart That Isn’t Mine, in which Nick and Brian are subjected to intense medical, physical, and psychological torture. For April Fools’ Day that year, I announced that I had joined a twelve-step program, Angstaholics Anonymous. For the eighth step, I had to make a list of people I’d harmed, so I could make amends to those people. I proceeded to list every bad thing I’ve done to each of the Boys in my fanfics. It was a very long list, which would be even longer now, six years later. But the best part of the prank – and the reason I put it at number two – was the Sarah McLachlan sad animal commercial parody I made as a spokesperson for the ASPCBSB, the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Backstreet Boys. That video will never not crack me up!
1. Broken, the Picture Book
My all-time favorite April Fools’ prank is from 2008, the year I finished writing the Broken series. I announced that I had rewritten Broken as a children’s picture book, which would soon be published. It featured purely fictional animal characters, including a chick named Nick and a piglet named Claire, who become fast friends as they take on cancer together. The fake cover and synopsis were based on an actual children’s book called I’m Still Me: Coping With Leukemia by Tim Peters and Company, which features a chick named Herbie who has leukemia. I’m pretty sure I had come across this book at some point while writing Broken or BMS, and that’s what inspired the picture book prank idea, but it could have been the other way around. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In any case, I edited the cover and gave poor “Herbie” a prosthetic leg to turn him into Broken Nick the Chick. I also made a whole website to go with it, which included a fake review from my friend Dee (“Minako”), an author page that listed a few of my funniest fanfic accolades, and my favorite part: a preview of the book. For the preview, I created an image of a couple of pages from the book, featuring the scene in which Nick undergoes the amputation of his leg. I had way too much fun photoshopping an illustration of a beaver surgeon (“Dr. Kingsbeaver”) gnawing off Broken Nick the Chick’s leg with her teeth. I put some serious time and effort into bringing this fake picture book to life, and that’s why it remains my favorite April Fools’ prank!
After twenty-five years, I’m about tapped out of fresh ideas for pranks, so there may come a day when I don’t post anything funny on April first. But I’m proud of myself for keeping this tradition alive for as long as I have. It’s always fun to see longtime visitors come back to the site to see what I’ve done for April Fools’ Day, and I especially appreciate when people leave comments that acknowledge my pranks. If you’re one of those people, thank you! For a journey through twenty-five years’ worth of my April Fools’ pranks, check out the About page!