Category: Wayback Wednesday Posts

This week’s Wayback Wednesday post takes us back to 2004 for the second part of last week’s blog on Broken. It’s a good thing I broke this into two parts because I knew it would be long. This story is still “my baby,” and I have a lot to say about it!

Broken is the story that made me the writer I am today. It’s the story that taught me the most about writing and helped me develop my style. You can actually see that development occur over the course of the story, which took me just over a year to write. But wow, what a year that was!

Read“Wayback Wednesday #5: 2004”

For this week’s Wayback Wednesday post, we’re going back to 2003, the year I wrote a “fan favorite” and one of my personal favorites as well… Broken!

We’re now up to the era in which I started writing novels that took longer than a year to write, meaning I also wrote fewer stories per year, so this blog will actually be a two-parter. In Part 1, I’ll talk about the origins of Broken. Part 2 will be more about the impact of Broken.

I should also warn you that the reason I’ve been hiding the rest of these blogs under a “Continue reading” link is not just because they’re long, but because they do contain spoilers for the stories. Keep that in mind for the ones you haven’t read. If you plan on reading one in the future and don’t want anything spoiled, don’t click. On the other hand, if you’ve always scrolled past a particular story because you weren’t sure if it was something you’d want to read or not, you can click and read the “Straightforward synopsis.” I purposely write pretty vague synopses for my stories so as not to give too much away about the plot, but these versions are meant to get right to the point of what the story’s really about.

Case in point…

Read“Wayback Wednesday #4: 2003”

Happy New Year! I can’t believe it’s 2020! Crazy!

As we enter a new decade, the twentieth anniversary of Dreamer’s Sanctuary feels even closer.  For this week’s Wayback Wednesday post, I’m going to rearrange the digits in the new year and take you back to 2002 to my beloved soap opera of a collaboration, Code Blue.

Read“Wayback Wednesday #3: 2002”

Merry Christmas!  I want to wish everyone a happy holiday, full of flying pandaskunks, rocket ships, and random fun.

In continuing with my weekly series of retrospective posts leading up to the site’s twentieth anniversary in April, Part 2 takes us back to 2001, to a light-hearted, fluffy little romance I wrote called Beside the Ocean.  Just kidding about the “light-hearted, fluffy” part.  In true Julie fashion, this is a love story about death.

Read“Wayback Wednesday #2: 2001”

Hello everyone!  I’ve missed being able to update these last few weeks.  Since finishing A Heart That Isn’t Mine, I have started the new pandaskunk story I mentioned back in November, but it’s not very far along yet.  I’m still hoping to be able to post at least a part or two before Christmas, but the reality is that I’ll still be writing this thing after the holidays.  I hope you won’t mind reading it then.  I would just wait until next December to post it in its entirety, but it incorporates recent events in the fandom, so it won’t be as timely next year.  Thanks for bearing with me.

As we approach the new year, we are also nearing a significant milestone… besides the youngest Backstreet Boy turning forty, I mean. April 29, 2020 will mark Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s twentieth anniversary! Off the top of my head, I can’t name another BSB fanfic site that is twenty years old and still actively being updated. My site has never been the biggest or the best, but it may be the longest-lasting – and hey, I’ll take pride in that!

To commemorate this milestone, I’m going to start a weekly series of “Wayback Wednesday” posts that will span the twenty-year history of the site and my fanfic writing “career,” spotlighting one of the stories I wrote each year. Newer readers may be interested in seeing where I started (and how far I’ve come since), while longtime readers may enjoy the nostalgia. And for those who don’t care at all, that’s okay too – I just thought this would help fill the gap in updates until I’m ready to start posting a new story.

We begin way back in the year 2000. I started writing fanfic right around this time of year, twenty years ago, when I was fourteen. My first attempt at a fanfic was just a few scenes written in a notebook. I ended up abandoning that story and starting another, which I will get to in a moment, but I later went back to that original idea and rewrote it as Years of Grace, which was published online in 2001.

The second story I started was also the first fanfic I finished and the first one I shared with the world online. It was called Heartache, and it’s the story I’m spotlighting in this first post because it’s really where this all began!

Read“Wayback Wednesday #1: 2000”