Category: Blog Posts

It’s Medical May! This week, we’re throwing it back to my top five favorite medical scenes. I’ve always been fascinated by medical stuff – even as a small child, my favorite book was Curious George Goes to the Hospital, and I grew up watching shows like Rescue 911 and ER and reading Lurlene McDaniel books about teenagers with terminal illnesses. So, naturally, when I began to write as a hobby, I gravitated toward medical-based storylines. Hospital scenes have become a staple of my stories, and I’ve certainly gotten better at writing them over the years. Here are the five I’m most proud of!

Read“Throwback Thursday #10: Top Five Favorite Medical Scenes”

We’ve finally made it to May, and what an exciting week it’s been in the BSB fandom!  A new BSB song with Rascal Flatts, a live performance on the ACM Awards, and an announcement about Nick’s long-awaited solo album, coming out next week!

This week, in honor of both Teacher Appreciation Week and National Nurses Week, I’m blogging about my favorite teacher and nurse characters. As a teacher myself, I love it when I have the rare opportunity to “write what I know” and include teacher characters and classroom scenes in my stories. If I wasn’t a teacher, I would probably be working somewhere in the healthcare field, so I have a healthy admiration for nurses as well and have included many of them in my stories over the years. Teachers and nurses are similar in a lot of ways. Traditionally female-dominated occupations, they both require patience, empathy, a nurturing personality, strong communication and problem-solving skills, and the ability to multitask and think on your feet. Despite the important role they play in our society, teachers and nurses tend to be disrespected, undervalued, and underpaid. So this post is dedicated to all the teachers and nurses out there. Special shout-out to school and medical support staff, too, including paraprofessionals, CNAs, technicians, orderlies, secretaries, custodians, cafeteria workers, and so forth. Anyone who’s worked in a school or clinical setting knows that these places would fall apart without all the important people who work together to keep them functioning well. Without further ado, here are my top five favorite teacher/nurse characters!

Read“Throwback Thursday #9: Top Five Favorite Teacher/Nurse Characters”

This past Sunday, the Backstreet Boys celebrated thirty-two years together! As most fans know, one of the reasons this group has stood the test of time while so many of their contemporaries have broken up or fizzled out is that they truly are a band of brothers. The genuine brotherly love AJ, Brian, Howie, Kevin, and Nick show for one another is something I have always appreciated, both in real life and in fanfiction. For my last Throwback Thursday blog of April, I’m looking back on some of my most “bromantic” stories.

Read“Throwback Thursday #8: Top Five Favorite Bromantic Fics”

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!

Read“Throwback Thursday #7: Top Five Favorite April Fools’ Day Pranks”

We’re just over a month away from Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s twenty-fifth anniversary, so I’m back with another Throwback Thursday blog. This week, I’m blogging about my favorite musical moments from my fanfiction. Music has always been a big part of my stories, which makes sense when you consider the fact that most of my main characters are musicians. Because I’ve written so many musical scenes over the years, choosing my top five favorites was a challenge. This was the hardest time I’ve had making one of these lists so far! In the end, I went with five scenes that made me feel some sort of way when I reread them – and what a wide range of feelings are represented here! But that’s the power of music. It packs an emotional punch!

Read“Throwback Thursday #6: Top Five Favorite Musical Moments”

March is Women’s History Month, so this week’s Throwback Thursday blog will focus on five of my favorite original female characters. Love them or hate them, OFCs have always been a big part of Backstreet Boys fan fiction. As BSB fangirls, we may not have been able to fulfill our teenage fantasy of hooking up with our favorite Backstreet Boy for real, but we could write a fanfic about it! Those of us who continued to write past our teenybopper years and into adulthood saw our female protagonists evolve from thinly-disguised self-inserts and Mary Sues to more mature, multifaceted characters, who may or may not have hooked up with a Backstreet Boy. Not all of them did!

Case in point…

Read“Throwback Thursday #5: Top Five Favorite Female Characters”

Happy birthday, Brian! I can’t believe you’re fifty! But still looking fine. 😍 In honor of the Birthday Boy, I’m throwing it back by blogging about five of my favorite portrayals of Brian in my fics.

I’ve always been a Brian girl and have actually written a lot of Brian stories, but it doesn’t feel that way because the majority of them were written almost twenty-five years ago! After Brian got married and became a father, I moved away from writing so much about him and started focusing on Nick more because, honestly, it was a lot easier to come up with ideas that involved a main character who was less settled in life. But, since those super old Brian stories I wrote back in high school suck, I’m focusing on my more recent Brian characters in this blog.

Read“Throwback Thursday #4: Top Five Favorite Fanfictional Brian Roles”

It’s finally February, and with Valentine’s Day coming up next week, love is in the air! So is smoke, fear, and hatred from the recent wildfires, plane crashes, and political upheaval here in the United States… but, since this is a fanfic website, and we’re all here to escape the hellscape that is the real world, let’s focus on the love. For my third Throwback Thursday blog, I’m featuring five of my favorite couples from my fics. While I’ve never considered myself to be a true romance writer, many of my novels do include romantic subplots. The original theme of this blog was going to be “favorite romantic chapters,” but when I realized that my top five might all come from the same story, I changed it to couples instead to ensure more variety. As I blog about each pair of characters, I’ll also include a link to one of my favorite romantic chapters that features them.

Read“Throwback Thursday #3: Top Five Favorite Fanfictional Couples”

I’m back with the second in my series of twenty-five retrospective blogs to commemorate this site’s upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary in April! A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated AJ’s birthday with a blog about my top five favorite fictional AJs. Since Nick’s birthday is next, it only makes sense to do the same for him. So here they are, my top five favorite portrayals of Nick!

Read“Throwback Thursday #2: Top Five Favorite Fanfictional Nick Roles”