Category: Updates

Happy 23rd anniversary to the fandom’s favorite couple, Kevin and Kristin Richardson! ❤️  Couple goals!

Chapter 36 of my Kevin romance, The World Will Be Waiting, is up!  This chapter contains a spoiler for the book/movie Me Before You.  The book is over ten years old at this point, so I’m assuming most people either have already read it/watched the movie or don’t care to, but just in case, consider yourself warned.  I first read this book ten years ago, a few weeks before I got the idea for My Brother’s Keeper.  It’s been so long that I forgot that was all the same summer.  While Me Before You didn’t directly inspire MBK, I’m sure it did have some influence on me.  I definitely watched the movie a few times during the writing of that story.  I like both the book and movie but have since learned that it’s almost universally despised by the disability community, particularly people with spinal cord injuries, because of the ending.  I have mixed feelings on this myself.  As a reader, I’m not a big fan of the ending either and completely understand why people who are actually disabled would hate it.  But, as a writer, I respect the author’s commitment to her idea, which was inspired by a true story that ended the same way.  I reread the book the first week of my summer break to refresh my memory after including it in my story, and while I still don’t like the ending, the rest of the book holds up.  If anyone else who’s read it or seen the movie wants to discuss in more detail, drop a comment on this post or in the chapter!

Full disclosure: This is the last chapter I currently have finished, so I can’t guarantee weekly updates will continue after this week.  I do have a solid start on Chapter 37, but writing has been slow-going this week.  Hopefully the pressure of catching up to myself will help me kick it into high gear next week so I can keep the regular updates coming.  Feedback is always appreciated and helps me stay inspired! 😉

Part of the reason I haven’t written as much as I should have this week is that I’ve fallen back down The Sims rabbit hole.  This week, I built two places from the Broken universe:  Leonardi’s Pizza and the Empress Theater.  The quality of writing in Broken may not be up to my current standards, but the settings I created were pretty solid!  They were both based on real life places, my grandparents’ favorite local pizzeria and a restored art deco theater near my college campus that shows old movies.  The Sims versions are even cuter!  Of course, I had to send Nick and Claire on a date and take some screenshots.  For my Broken readers, this is my little Sims reenactment of Chapters 117 and 118. 💛❤️

I also made the parking lot next to Leonardi’s and had fun filling it with vehicles from my fanfic universe.  Along with Nick’s silver Jaguar and Claire’s old Toyota (which I made red even though I don’t think I ever mentioned the specific color in the story), there is the yellow Hummer from 00Carter and Song for the Undead (inspired by Nick’s episode of Punk’d), the silver Corolla from A Heart That Isn’t Mine, Jori’s truck from Secrets of the Heart (without the paint job), Brian’s blue BMW and Nick’s green Durango from Broken, Claire’s yellow Beetle from By My Side, Natalie’s white Camry and Kevin’s black Silverado from The World Will Be Waiting, and Kevin’s accessible van from My Brother’s Keeper.

Yeah, so, clearly I have too much time on my hand right now.  Happy summer!

Earlier this week, I hit Day 500 of my consecutive daily writing streak!  The streak started in January of last year while I was writing My Brother’s Keeper and continued with its sequel, The World Will Be Waiting, which I started the same day I finished MBK so I could keep it going.  I’m proud of myself, both for maintaining it as long as I have and for finding a writing routine that works for me and will allow me to keep it going indefinitely (or at least until I finish TWWBW, which is my goal).

Reaching this level of consistency is a big deal for me because I haven’t always been disciplined enough to write regularly, let alone daily.  If you’re a long-time reader, you may remember the SAMS era, when I would sometimes go months without updating because I was so overwhelmed with life and didn’t have the time or energy to devote to writing fanfic.  I thought this would get better when I finished SAMS and life slowed down a little, but what followed was a year or so in which I hardly updated at all because I literally couldn’t focus on a single story long enough to get anywhere with it.  I flitted from story to story, starting drafts of what would become A Heart That Isn’t Mine and My Brother’s Keeper but struggling to continue them when I came to an obstacle.  I feel proud of the fact that I eventually did come back to both stories and finish them.  Ever since I got back into my writing groove with AHTIM, I’ve been pretty productive for the past four years.  I appreciate those of you who stuck around through the dry spell, as well as those of you who have discovered my site since.  Thanks for your support!

I had some time this week, so I made a video to commemorate and celebrate this milestone.  If you’re like me and enjoy “behind the scenes” stuff, you may be interested to see how a novel grows and changes over time. (Tip: If the video appears blurry on this page, open it in YouTube to play the HD version, which should be clear.)

 

 

 

I took a screenshot of each day of the streak in the version history of Google Docs to document my daily progress.  Since I write each story in one document instead of creating separate docs for each chapter, they are very large files and are slow to load.  On some days, the version history showed my edits in green the way it’s supposed to, and other days, it did not.  I don’t know why but assume it was a data issue from the files being so large.  You may have also noticed that on some days, I wrote several pages, and on others, I barely wrote several words.  There are chapters that I finished in a day and pages that took me over a week to fill.  That’s just how it goes.  But even when I was busy or tired or uninspired, I still opened the story and added something to it every day, and that’s how I’ve been able to continue updating every week.  I am starting to catch up to myself and am only a couple chapters ahead of what I’m posting today, so wish me a productive summer so I can build up my backlog of chapters before the school year starts again!

That being said, Chapter 35 of The World Will Be Waiting is up!  I had a lot of fun writing this chapter because it was different from the kind of stuff I usually write but also closer to my daily life as a teacher than the kind of stuff I usually write.  I guess there’s something to be said for the whole “write what you know” thing, although I’ve always preferred to look up what I don’t know and then write about that.  But after many years of writing heavy, angsty, life-or-death drama, it’s kind of a nice departure to write a story that’s a little happier and has more of a slice-of-life feel.  I never thought I would write a whole novel that fit that description – about Kevin, no less – but here I am, doing just that and loving it!  I guess I’ve learned something in the last 500+ days.  Here’s to 500 more!

I’m over the moon that it’s June!  It finally feels like summer, even though it doesn’t officially start for a few more weeks.  I spent most of this week doing professional development for work, so it wasn’t the most productive week in terms of writing, but the streak is still alive!  I’m almost to 500 days!  I left you hanging on The World Will Be Waiting last week, but never fear, Chapter 34 is here!  I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you to all the wonderful readers who visit this site and read my stories, whether here or on AO3.  Kudos to those of you who take time to let me know you’re reading and share your thoughts!  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate hearing from you!

Speaking of kudos, I have a mission for you, should you choose to accept it!  I’m on a quest to defeat the dreaded Kudos Bot from wreaking havoc on my stats on AO3.  What is the Kudos Bot, you ask?  It’s a bot that adds large amounts of guest kudos to random stories, usually stories with very few hits, comments, or real kudos.  It attacked a couple of the 00Carter episodes last year, and my stats are still skewed as a result.  Why is this a bad thing, you ask?  Don’t writers want kudos?  Well, yes, but we want real kudos from real readers.  These fake kudos may look legit to people who don’t know any differently, but they mean nothing to me because I know I didn’t earn them.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to delete them, so my stats page continues to look like this:

As much as I adore 00Carter, “In the Wink of an Eye” clearly doesn’t deserve to be in the top five in terms of kudos.  If you know me, you probably know I am a little OCD when it comes to stats and numbers, so it annoys me to no end to see this.  I would love to be able to bump it out of the top five and boost Curtain Call into its rightful fifth place so that at least the bar graph is legit.

Here’s how you can help!  If you’ve read and enjoyed any of my stories in the past, click their titles below and leave a kudo!  Bonus points if you’re logged into your AO3 account, but if you don’t have one of those, you can still leave kudos as a guest.  (But please only leave one kudo per story and only on stories that you actually read.  Again, the goal here is legitimacy; I’m not trying to inflate my stats with fake or duplicate kudos.)

Curtain Call

A Heart That Isn’t Mine

Heroic Measures

My Brother’s Keeper

The Road to Bethlehem

Secrets of the Heart

Sick as My Secrets

Song for the Undead

The World Will Be Waiting

I just linked my novels/novellas, but feel free to visit my full works page if you’d like to leave kudos on any other stories.  I haven’t posted the Broken series on AO3 yet due to its length and the amount of editing it needs.  Too overwhelming for me now, but that could be a summer project at some point.  Anyway, thanks again to anyone willing to help me with my kudos drive!

It’s been a long, hard school year, but I’m breathing a huge sigh of relief today because I made it to my summer break!  No more pencils, no more books…  Well, that’s only half-true; I never write in pencil, but I hope to do lots of writing and reading over the next couple months!  Chapter 33 of The World Will Be Waiting is up.  Hope you enjoy!

Congratulations to the Backstreet Boys on the culmination of their wonderful DNA World Tour!  I feel blessed to have been able to see the show seven times in five different cities over the course of the two legs they did in North America.  I’ve been to at least one concert on every tour since Into the Millennium, and DNA had the best setlist.  (Bonus points for including my favorite song, “Don’t Wanna Lose You Now.”)  Even after four years, I’m sad to see it end but excited for what’s coming next – hopefully new music!  As long as there’ll be music, they’ll be coming back again… and the world will be waiting!

And, hey, speaking of The World Will Be Waiting, Chapter 32 is up!  If you rely on Twitter to be notified of updates, you should know that the plugin I use to automatically tweet a link to my posts no longer works with Twitter (thanks, Elon 🙄).  I will try to get in the habit of tweeting it myself, but if you’re not subscribed to my email list, you may want to do that.  Sign up on the sidebar if you’re on the desktop version of the site or scroll down to the bottom of the page if you’re on the mobile version.

Summer’s almost here, and this tired teacher is beyond ready!  See ya next Saturday with the next chapter!