Oh my god, we’re back again! As promised, the 00Carter crew (Rose, Dee, and I) have returned with our first new episode in almost a decade!
Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of 00Carter’s conception on the Absolute Chaos forum. If you’d asked me on January 2, 2007 if I thought I’d be writing this story about Nick as a secret agent fifteen years later, I would have said, “No way.” To be honest, I had no intention of writing it then. I thought it was a cute idea Rose came up with, and I had fun helping her brainstorm for it, but I didn’t plan on being part of it. I wasn’t a James Bond fan and knew nothing about the world of secret agents and espionage. I didn’t much care for AU either, unless it was a medical drama about the Boys being doctors. I was in the middle of writing By My Side and was happy in my little Nick & Claire bubble. I wasn’t looking for a new project. But the more we talked about it, the more I got into the idea of Nick being this charming Bond-esque secret agent. I even made a little Flash animation of the famous Bond gun barrel sequence with Nick in it instead, which you can see in my 2008 Windows Movie Maker intro video below. (LOL) I had fun doing that, so I offered to design a website for the story and help edit it, both things that were more in my wheelhouse. Of course, Rose can be very convincing, and she talked me into joining the writing team as well. The rest is history!
Like most collaborations, 00Carter started off strong and then gradually began to fall apart. We started the story with a team of eleven writers, which was fun and exciting at first but eventually proved to be way too many people trying to work together. The problem wasn’t with any one person. It was just an organizational nightmare trying to keep everyone on the same page. Communication was difficult. We came from four different countries on two different continents in completely different time zones, so trying to get the whole group together for a chat to plan episodes was almost impossible. Because we spoke different languages and had different writing styles and experience levels, there was a lack of continuity between scenes and characters. We didn’t all know each other well before we started writing together, which made it hard to give constructive criticism without worrying about hurt feelings. We got along well for the most part, but, of course, we occasionally had conflicting ideas and differences of opinion. Once the honeymoon phase ended, the initial enthusiasm some writers had for the story faded. Life got in the way, and it took longer and longer for people to write their parts. Rose and I ran a tight ship; we started making rules and setting deadlines in an effort to finish episodes in a reasonable amount of time, but this just pushed people away. They started leaving the project. By the time we finished “A 00Carter Christmas,” the last episode we posted before our unofficial hiatus, in December 2012, we were down to just four writers, who were burnt out from the effort of trying to keep a sinking ship afloat. So we took a break. A very long break.
Throughout the hiatus, I never lost my love for 00Carter. It’s one of the funniest, quirkiest, and most creative stories I’ve ever helped write, and I’m proud to be a part of it. Despite the update drought, I never considered 00Carter to be discontinued or abandoned. It’s always been listed on the right side of this site as one of my “in progress” projects. Rose and I talked about it often over the years, and every time it came up in our conversations, we both said we wanted to continue it someday, even if it was just the two of us writing together. We thought it might even be easier with just the two of us. After all, we managed to complete another long, successful collaboration, Song for the Undead, in the meantime. But life got in the way for both of us. We got busy with other projects, and the timing never felt right to come back to 00Carter.
Then the pandemic struck. During lockdown, Dee rediscovered her love of fanfic and returned to Absolute Chaos, where we had first become friends and conceived the idea for 00Carter. When we started talking about trying to revive the story, she, Rose, and I all expressed an interest in continuing it. It took us a while to move from just talking about it to actually planning and then writing, but once we did this past summer, it felt fresh and exciting again, like it had in the beginning. Only this time, the experience has been even better because we’re all older, wiser, and more in sync than we were before. It’s a lot easier to keep three people on the same page than eleven. In addition to writing new episodes, we decided to go back and edit the old ones. We didn’t change any plot points, just polished the writing by fixing grammar and continuity errors. It’s been fun reminiscing on the old episodes as we repost them each week, but we’re ready to finally debut the first episode we’ve finished since our big return!
Episode 12 of 00Carter is called “Mr. Body Beautiful,” and as you might have inferred, it’s focused on our beloved Kevin, otherwise known as Agent K.
Synopsis: When Dr. Rough’s undercover agent implants K with a microscopic bomb, 00Carter, Jay, and Styx must shrink to go inside K’s body and deactivate it.
I’m obviously biased, but I think this is the best episode of 00Carter yet! It will certainly go down as one of my favorites – and not just because it includes medical drama. But for those of you who liked stories like A Heart That Isn’t Mine, this is the 00Carter episode that comes the closest, albeit with a lot more comedy. Dee, Rose, and I had so much fun writing this one together and have been eagerly waiting to share it with the world for a few months now. Hopefully it was worth the wait! We’re posting Part 1 today and will be back every Monday with another part until it’s up in its entirety. The episode is already finished, so we promise not to leave you hanging! If you read it, please leave us a comment here, on the 00Carter site, or on AO3 and let us know what you think! After almost ten years, any feedback from actual readers would mean the world to us! Thanks in advance for giving our story a chance!