Category: Updates

Thanks so much for the support on Twitter for my last post.  I love Brian, and I hate conflict and confrontation, so it was difficult for me to speak out against his wife.  As soon as I clicked the publish button, I felt sick to my stomach at the thought of him possibly seeing my post.  I typically try to fly under the radar, but as I’ve seen many people say, “Silence is compliance.”  After days of feeling conflicted over this, I couldn’t stay quiet anymore. In the past couple days, Leighanne has made her Facebook page private and protected her tweets, which at least makes it so only her friends and followers will see her posts. She has also expressed a willingness to have a conversation with some of the fans who respectfully called her out, saying it’s something she’s been discussing with Brian. I consider this a small victory for the BSB Army.

Speaking of Brian…  A few of my fellow Brian girls were talking on Twitter this week about how we wish Brian had a fan club, so we decided to start an unofficial one of our own in the form of a forum for Brian fans.  If you would like to join us in drama-free discussion about all things Brian, head over to the Brian Littrell Fan Forum!

And finally, for those who have been reading Heroic Measures, you’re finally gonna get some answers about Brian.  I know I left you hanging last week, still wondering about his fate.  Hopefully Chapter 5, which is up now, will help make up for that!  This is the first chapter I wrote during quarantine, and it’s more than triple the length of any of the previous chapters, so it’s like you’re getting three chapters for the price of one.

This is the perfect point in the story for me to give a shoutout to the writers of ER.  Writing this story was a lot harder than I thought it would be because of the level of research it took to get things “right.”  I put that word in quotes because I’m sure it’s not perfect, and neither is ER, but as far as TV medical dramas go, that show comes pretty damn close.  I’ve read articles and watched videos with real doctors reviewing the various hospital shows on their realism, and they always rank ER near the top.  As I researched for this chapter in particular, I made a point of looking up what was considered best practice in 1995 because I know the guidelines have changed since then.  Reading journal articles from the early nineties and then watching ER episodes made around that same time, I was able to appreciate just how right the show got it most of the time.   And not only did they nail the medical info, but the way they wove it so seamlessly into the action of each scene was masterful.  I tried my best to emulate them, but it was definitely not as easy as the ER writers always made it look.  Kudos to them!

Chapter 4 of Heroic Measures is up!  ER fans, these next four chapters are for you – they feature a ton of characters from the show and the most medical stuff in the story.  Enjoy!

It’s been a LONG time since I’ve revamped the site – six-and-a-half years, in fact!  That’s the longest I’ve ever kept the same layout, by far!  There are a couple reasons for this:  1) I dearly loved my Make Believe layout, and 2) I was afraid to mess up the site by changing WordPress themes.  I made many customizations to my old theme, Mantra, which served me well for over seven years.  But after that long, I was ready for a change and figured this was the perfect time for a revamp!  I’ve spent the last two days designing and customizing a new layout, courtesy of a different theme from the the folks at Cryout Creations, Fluida.  If anyone reading this uses WordPress for their website, I highly recommend the themes from Cryout Creations, as they are ultra-customizable, easy to configure, and best of all, free!

I also want to give credit to the Backstreet Boys’ amazing photographer, Justin Segura, who took all of the concert photos I incorporated into the layout.  I call this layout “Starlight,” and it was inspired by the beautiful photo in the header, which was taken in Mexico earlier this year.  I know many of us in North America were looking forward to concerts coming up soon and are bummed by the postponement of the tour.  This layout represents where we all wish we could be!

As with any revamp, you may come across some glitches that I haven’t caught yet.  If you do find a broken link or part of the site that doesn’t work right, please let me know so I can fix it.  You can leave a comment on this post or contact me directly.  Most of the changes I made are cosmetic – different colors and fonts – but I did have to change a few short story links for navigation purposes.

You should be able to find everything on the same pages as before, with two exceptions:  I moved my two oldest collaborations, Code Blue and Phantasm, to the Dreamer’s Sanctuary Archive, where I keep all my other old stories from the pre-Broken era, 2000-2002. Unfortunately, I have given up hope of ever continuing Code Blue, and I don’t feel much of a connection to Phantasm, since it was a round robin I just contributed a couple of chapters to.  You can find both stories at the bottom of the My Stories page on the Archive if you still want to read them.  As Brianna reminded me earlier, there are some oldies-but-goodies among the hosted stories posted there too!

I hope you like the new look of the site!  I know many of you read on your phones, and the mobile layout should work at least as well, if not better than the last one, but I highly recommend you pull it up on a computer if you can.  It’s so much more beautiful there!  If you do use your phone, try turning it sideways; the header definitely looks better that way.  If you have any issues or feedback, feel free to reach out!

I’ll be back on Thursday with the next chapter of Heroic Measures!

Thanks so much for the love for my latest story, Heroic Measures!  Whether you’re reading it here or on Archive of Our Own or Absolute Chaos, I appreciate your feedback!

I probably should have started posting this story sooner because I actually finished it last night!  As of two weeks ago, though, I was only on Chapter 7 and didn’t realize my end-of-story streak was about to begin.  I’m going to stick to the “one chapter a week” updating plan because it will give me some time to get further on the new novel I started so that hopefully I’ll be ready to start posting that when I’m done posting this one at the end of summer.  (Also, I’m a bit of a fanfic sadist who enjoys leaving cliffhangers at the end of chapters and making you guys wait a week to find out what happens next.  Bwahaha!)

It’s been fun writing such a throwback story.  Other than a few Brian one-shots I wrote twenty years ago, I’d never written a fanfic that takes place prior to 1999, so it was interesting writing the guys that young!  Of course, I like to keep things realistic, so the first thing I did when I got the idea for this story was to make a list of all the times I knew the Boys had been in Chicago and then correlate those with what was happening in ER at that time – what season it was, who was in the cast, what relationships and story arcs were going on, etc.  I narrowed my setting down to three possible time periods that I thought would work well, but I went with the fall of 1995 for a few reasons.  First, it was the only way to include all of the original ER cast members, and as much as I love some of the characters from the later seasons, I couldn’t imagine writing an ER fanfic without the OGs.  Second, it takes place during Season 2, which also features a couple of my favorite one-season supporting characters:  Shep the paramedic and Harper the med student.  I loved including them both in the story.  And finally, it was nice to be able to focus on the Boys and their relationship with each other before they found fame and started their own families.  I’m always looking for creative ways to keep the wives and kids out of my stories as much as realistically possible, so setting this one well before any of them had wives and kids was a perfect solution to that problem.  Plus, the fact that Nick and AJ were under eighteen made it more plausible that one or both of them would be treated by a certain pediatrician… but I’m getting ahead of myself there. 😉

Chapter 2 has been posted.  I hope you enjoy it!  I’ll be back next Thursday night with Chapter 3!