Category: Updates

Yesterday, the Backstreet Boys celebrated their 20th anniversary as a group!  It was fun to look back on the last twenty years, but even more fun to look forward to what the future will bring for the Boys and us Backstreet fans:  new music, another album, a world tour, a documentary, and of course, the next cruise!  It’s so great to see the five of them together, when so many people thought they’d be long since broken up by now.  Last night’s celebrations made me feel proud and blessed to be a BSB fan!

Dreamer’s Sanctuary also has an anniversary coming up soon.  Next week, on April 29, the site will celebrate its 13th birthday.  That’s right, DS is almost a teenager!  It’s crazy to think I’ve been at this that long, since I was a teenager myself, but I’m proud of how much the site has grown since then and grateful to those of you who still visit, whether you’ve been around since the beginning or just recently discovered it.  Thank you!  I hope this place will be around for many more years to come!

In honor of both anniversaries, I have an update for you today:  three more installments of Revenge of the Slaughtered!  They are Kills #24-26, and together, they make up the Kitt Fit Kill Trilogy.  For those of you who have the stomach to digest my gory horror, I hope you enjoy!  For those of you who don’t… well, my summer vacation starts in about a month, so hopefully you’ll get some more variety when I have more time to write!

Until then, thanks for visiting, and happy reading!

I hope you enjoyed my April Fool’s story better than my first April Fool’s prank.

I actually have two real story updates for you today!

Chapter 105 of Song for the Undead is up, as well as Kill #23 for Revenge of the Slaughtered, written by yours truly!  All of the chapters I’ve contributed to both Revenge of the Slaughtered and 1000 Ways to Kill Nick Carter are now posted right here on the site, as well as on Absolute Chaos, where you can contribute a chapter of your own if you’d like!

In other news, the Dreamer’s Sanctuary forum has undergone an upgrade and is looking better than ever!  Head on over to discuss your favorite fanfics, the Boys, and more!

Enjoy the updates!

APRIL FOOL!

Please disregard my previous post. I am not taking a hiatus from fan fiction; that was an April fool. And to prove it, I’ve written a new story for you! It’s a one-shot called Behind the Curtain, and it’s a companion piece to Curtain Call.

Click the banner below to go directly to the story, or you can also access it from the Short Stories page.

Enjoy the update, and thanks for the tweets from those of you who reacted to my “announcement,” whether you believed it or not.  That was a hard post to write; I’m glad it wasn’t for real!

Once again, this is not an update, but, rather, an announcement.

If you’ve been coming to this site for any length of time, I’m sure you’re aware of how the updates have slowed down over the last few months/years.  It’s been especially slow lately.  I have been busy with real life, of course, but I won’t make any more excuses.  The truth is that I just haven’t had the motivation or inspiration to write.

This has been going on for awhile.  It’s evident in the lack of updates on all of my stories.  Guilty Roads hasn’t been updated in I don’t even know how long.  The Harry Potter crossover that was I so gung-ho about around this time last year hasn’t been updated since.  Even the collaborations I was so into have fallen by the wayside.

It is with a heavy heart that I admit defeat and officially announce that I am taking a hiatus from writing fan fiction.  I will continue to contribute to 00Carter and help Rose finish Song for the Undead because I owe her and my other co-writers that much, but for the time being, I will not be updating any of my other projects.  I want to use this time to focus on my personal life and other creative endeavors, without the pressure of any unfinished novels or a website waiting to be updated.

Lately, whenever I think of this site or the stories on it, I get a sick feeling in my stomach because I know I’m letting you down.  Take today, for example.  It’s April Fool’s Day, and I ALWAYS do something to the site or write a joke story for April Fool’s.  In twelve years, I have never failed to produce an April Fool’s prank.  But this year?  I got nothing.  It hit me this weekend as I was scrambling to come up with an idea, knowing I had no time and even less inspiration to get something done.  And that’s when I knew… this is the end.

I’ve always vowed I would never be one of those writers who just falls off the face of the internet and disappears, never to update her stories again, or worse, the one who removes her stories without warning first.  I promised I would at least warn you and let you know what was going on.  So now that that time has come, here it is.

I will not be removing my stories, and I will continue to pay for my domain so my site can stay online.  I don’t want Dreamer’s Sanctuary to disappear completely.  I’m also not going to say that I will never write again.  I hope that, after taking some time off, I will rediscover my love of writing.  I would love to explore other fandoms, such as Harry Potter, The Walking Dead, and Tetris, as well as original fiction.  And who knows, maybe one day I’ll even come back to BSB and finish some of the unfinished stories I’m leaving behind.  But for now, it’s time for me to say goodbye.

Thank you for all the support over the years!

Signing off,

Julie

Winners for the 2012 Felix Awards were announced over at Absolute Chaos last night, and thanks to your votes, I won several awards!

• Best Fantasy/Supernatural Author
• 1st Runner Up for Best Fantasy/Supernatural Story for Secrets of the Heart
• 1st Runner Up for Best Alternate Universe Author
• Best Collaboration Authors (with Rose)
• Best Collaboration for 1000 Ways to Kill Nick Carter
• Best Text Summary for Curtain Call

Thank you for your votes!

Thanks to those of you who voted for me at the Backstreet Boys Fan Fiction Awards!  I was 1st runner-up in three categories:

• Best Story That Ended in 2012 for Song for the Undead (even though it hasn’t ended yet LOL)
• Best Ending for Hybrid
• Best Villain for “Nick the Ripper” (part of Revenge of the Slaughtered)
  

Thanks again for these awards!  Also, thanks to those of you who have registered as readers on the site!  Hopefully one of these days I’ll actually update a story that’s posted on the new site so you can try out the review feature LOL.

This isn’t a real update, but I wanted to acknowledge this anniversary.  Not only is it the 33rd anniversary of our beloved blonde Backstreet Boy’s birth, but it’s also the anniversary of a couple of milestones on this site.

January 28, 2003:  Ten years ago on this date, I posted the first two chapters of a new story I had just started called Broken.  In the update blurb on the site that day, I wrote, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to post it yet or not because I just started it last week and wasn’t sure if I would keep going on it or not.”  Thank goodness I did, because Broken turned out to be one of the biggest successes of my fanfic-writing life.  It’s the story that brought a lot of you here at some point in the last decade.  It’s also the story that, for better or worse, taught me the most about writing and made me the writer I am today.  I can’t believe it’s ten years old!

January 28, 2008:  Five years ago on this date, and five years after Broken began, I posted the last three chapters of its sequel, By My Side.  One of the only sequels I’ve successfully completed, By My Side is also my longest novel by far, weighing in at around 800,000 words and well over 1,000 pages.  No wonder it took almost four years of consistent writing to finish!  The day I posted the end of BMS still holds the record for the most traffic ever on Dreamer’s Sanctuary.  While it certainly isn’t the best thing I’ve ever written, it is definitely the biggest achievement of my writing “career” so far.

So happy birthday (and sorry), Nick!  Happy birthday, Broken!  And happy anniversary, BMS!  And thank you, readers, for sticking around and supporting the site through all these years!

Chapter 104 of Song for the Undead is up!  Rose and I hope you enjoy it!

Also, I’ve been having a lot of problems with spam comments and reviews, so for the time being, I’m requiring readers to register for the site in order to comment or review.  You can become a registered reader by clicking here or registering on the sidebar to the right.  I apologize for this extra step and hope it won’t deter anyone from leaving feedback; it should help keep the site clean and free of spam.  Thanks for your support!

It’s the first story update of the new year – AND the new site! Chapter 103 of Song for the Undead is up!  It’s a long and eventful chapter, hopefully worth the wait!  Enjoy!

If you like Undead and my co-writer Rose’s writing, check out her brand new site and my affiliate, Double Rainbow Fiction!  There you will find more of her stories, as well as our other collaborations.

Also, time is running out to vote in the Felix Awards and the Best of BSB Fan Fiction Awards.  If you haven’t voted yet, click the links below to cast your vote!

Vote for The Felix Awards! (Voting ends January 20.)

Vote for The Best of BSB Fan Fiction 2012 Awards! (Voting ends January 31.)

I’ve converted my latest complete novel, Secrets of the Heart, into eFic format.  You can now download it as an EPUB, MOBI, or PDF file on the eFics page for use on your e-reader or tablet.

I also figured out how to fix some of the issues the other eFics were having (the Kindle/MOBI versions, anyway) with the table of contents not showing every chapter.  I updated all of the eFic files with versions that should work better, so if anyone was bothered by this glitch before, feel free to re-download.

The only issue I had with them this time around was the covers not displaying properly on my Kindle Fire.  After looking into this, I discovered this is a Kindle issue a lot of people have experienced and not related to Calibre, the program I used to convert them.  Repeated syncing, clearing data from the Amazon Kindle app, shutting down and powering back on, and waiting awhile seems to fix this.  If you need more detailed instructions on this, leave a comment, and I’d be happy to try and help!

I hope you’re enjoying the new site!  If you have any feedback on the site or updates, click the title of this or any updates post to leave a comment!