Category: Wayback Wednesday Posts

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Dreamer’s Sanctuary! On April 29, 2000, I registered my first Geocities account and posted the first pages of my first fanfiction website. I wish I had a screenshot of what the site looked like back then, but sadly, I don’t, and the Wayback Machine doesn’t go back that far. My fifteenth anniversary April Fool’s Day layout comes close, especially the main page, which had a light blue cloud background, purple Comic Sans font (’cause Comic Sans was da bomb back then, at least among us teenyboppers! LOL), and some of the same pictures and graphics. My current layout, which I’ve had for the last few years, pays homage to the original cloud layout.

When I started this site, I had just turned 15 years old and had been writing fanfic for about four months. I only had a few stories to post. Two decades later, I just turned 35 and have over 70 stories posted online. It’s been fun blogging about some of the most memorable ones from the past twenty years over these last twenty weeks.

For my last Wayback Wednesday post, we’re looking back at last year and the story that resuscitated my writing hobby, A Heart That Isn’t Mine.

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t read the story, please do that before you read the rest of this blog.

Read“Wayback Wednesday #20: 2019”

Be sure to get your votes in for Round 3 of the Story Tournament before Saturday! Personally, I thought the battle between Curtain Call and Sick as My Secrets would be a lot closer than it was last time I looked… but maybe the slash fans haven’t had their say yet.

Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s 20th anniversary is only one week away, so this is the second to the last of the Wayback Wednesday blogs I’ve been doing. For this week’s blog, we’re going back to 2018, which isn’t even really worth blogging about because it was the worst year of my life, a year in which bad things happened and I wrote next to nothing. I don’t even have a story to reflect on for 2018 because, although I worked on several over the course of the year, I literally only updated one, 1000 Ways to Kill Nick Carter, and I already blogged about that one. Sad panda.

2018 started off promisingly. I posted on New Year’s Day, bragging about what a productive winter break I’d had so far, how I’d started not one, but two new novels. And that was true! I started the story that would eventually become A Heart That Isn’t Mine for the second time, after scrapping the first draft I’d started the previous summer. (More on that next week.) I also started a Kevin/Nick story called My Brother’s Keeper, which I felt good enough about to share a “sneak peek” of, but not confident enough about to post “officially” with the implied commitment of continuing to update it regularly. After four years of being flaky with my updates due to being busy with my master’s classes and life in general, I was determined to be more consistent about updating my next story, so I wanted to wait until I was far enough into said story to start posting it. For the second year in a row, I made a New Year’s resolution, this time to write something every day. I’d kept the previous year’s resolution to write every weekend for longer than I thought I would, and it definitely helped me get back on track and finish Sick as My Secrets sooner than I had expected to. Surely, making another resolution would help me get going on another story, right?

Read“Wayback Wednesday #19: 2018”

Have you voted for your favorite DS fics in Round 2 of the Story Tournament yet?  If not, click here to cast your votes!

For this week’s Wayback Wednesday blog, we’re going back to 2017. The first half of 2017 was really productive for me, in terms of writing. After being pretty flaky the previous three years due to my master’s program, I was determined to show some discipline and get back into a more regular writing routine. I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, but I set one that year to write every weekend. Not only did I keep that resolution until Nick Plague struck me down in March, but I wrote daily for two months straight. I got back into my groove with Sick as My Secrets and finished it in June.

And then… nothing.

I spent the rest of that summer (really, the whole next year) struggling with what I like to call “WADD,” or Writer’s Attention Deficit Disorder, which is when I flit aimlessly from one project to another without being able to settle down on any one of them long enough to make any real progress. More on that in my next blog.

In the fall of 2017, I finally managed to write a short story called The Call, which is what I’ll be blogging about this week.

Read“Wayback Wednesday #18: 2017”

I hope everyone’s staying healthy and hanging in there!

Have you voted in the polls for Round 1 of the Dreamer’s Sanctuary 20th Anniversary Story Tournament? If not, what are you waiting for?  Click here to cast your votes!  I changed the set-up a bit since I originally posted this on Monday to spread the polls out across four pages instead of having all sixteen on the same page because I noticed some of them weren’t loading when they were trying to do it all at the same time.  If you have any trouble getting them to load still, try refreshing the page – that has always worked for me.  You don’t have to vote in every poll, either; you can pick the ones with stories you’ve read and vote for those. The polls for Round 1 will be open the rest of this week, and Round 2 will begin on Monday.

This week, we’re going back to 2016 to talk about Sick as My Secrets. About time, right? I’ve been waiting a while to get to this one! I actually started writing this story in 2013 and began posting it in 2014, but I chose to wait until this week to blog about it because it’s literally the only story I updated in 2016. Much like Broken a decade earlier, SAMS was written during a busy time of change in my life. In the almost four years it took me to write this story, I started and finished a three-year master’s degree program and bought my first home, both of which came with more responsibilities. Between taking classes and taking care of the new house on top of working full time, my writing time decreased significantly and my updates slowed down. That’s why SAMS took me so long to write and why I wasn’t writing much else (fanfic, anyway) at the time. I’m grateful I had this story to keep me going during this period because, without it, it would have been easy to walk away from fanfic for a while, and for all I know, I may not have wanted to come back. I’m glad I did!

Read“Wayback Wednesday #17: 2016”

Hello! I hope everyone is staying well!

My latest project born out of quarantine boredom has been posting my stories on Archive of Our Own (AO3).  I’ve been wanting to branch out to a more active fanfic archive for awhile now, since Absolute Chaos is mostly dead these days.  It’s been interesting seeing the differences between archives.  I really like the features and user-friendliness of A03 so far.  I’ve chosen to backdate my stories to their original post dates because I’m OCD, but I decided I’m going to post Curtain Call (and eventually Sick as My Secrets and A Heart That Isn’t Mine) chapter by chapter as if I were still updating them so they have a chance at being seen and read. The problem with backdating is that the stories get buried and don’t show up with the recently-updated ones, which kind of defeats the purpose of posting on a new site. Anyway, if you read or post stories on AO3, please subscribe to RokofAges75. Kudos and comments are greatly appreciated as I try to build up a reader base on a new site!

Since I’ve only posted one of my novels (Secrets of the Heart) on AO3 so far, almost all of my works there are short stories, which are mostly comedies and challenge entries.  I feel like I’m best known for writing drama, but as the past few weeks have shown, I’ve written some pretty silly stories too. For this week’s Wayback Wednesday, I’m blogging about one of the weirdest ones I’ve ever written, even by Rose’s and my standards… Sharkolas!

Read“Wayback Wednesday #16: 2015”