Dreamer's Sanctuary

After all the drama in November and December, this has been a great week for the BSB fandom.  It was so very satisfying to see Nick finally take steps to get the stage five clingers out of his life.  Go get ’em, Nick!  I also loved seeing the guys together in South America, performing shows for huge stadiums full of 40,000+ fans.  I especially loved seeing them all topless in the pool! 😍

How blessed are we to have these five boys in our lives?

After weeks of indecision, I also bought passes for ’90s Con in March to see Nick and AJ!  I had been thinking about going but didn’t want to make a decision before I knew what their plans were for the 30th anniversary in April, since I can only take a few days off of work.  But a few of my friends from the fandom are going, and I believe God gave me a sign that I should go, too.  True story:  I had a horrible nightmare about the guys last Saturday night, the kind of nightmare you’d probably expect me to have more often, given the content of the fanfics I write about them.  Thankfully, my stories rarely inspire dreams, and this one had nothing to do with what I’ve been writing.  But it was bad.  Like, the worst.  At least it was a lucid dream, and I managed to wake myself up before I got to the worst part.  But before that, I thought (in my dream), “Well, I guess I won’t be going to ’90s Con now.”  So when I woke up and reassured myself that it was only a dream and the boys were fine, I decided this was God’s way of telling me to take a weekend trip to Hartford because, hey, life is short.  Besides, I’ve never been to Connecticut before.  So I’m super excited about that!  Who else is going?!

Onto the update!  Chapter 18 of The World Will Be Waiting is up!  It has dinosaurs in it!  Enjoy!

I’ve had a good writing day today, which is why this update is coming so late in the day – I couldn’t tear myself away from the chapter I’m writing long enough to post this one.  I hit page 300 of the story this week, and my writing streak is still going strong at 379 days.  I don’t really know what target I’m aiming for now that I’ve made it over a year, but I guess my goal is to keep the daily streak going until I’m done with this novel.  I have quite a ways to go yet, but it would be cool to be able to say I wrote every day from the beginning of the story to the end.  I love this story and am happy writing it for my own enjoyment, but as writing fanfic has become an increasingly lonely hobby in this fandom, I very much appreciate those of you who take the time to let me know you’re reading and tell me what you like about it.  Thank you for your support!

I love when my update day falls on a Backstreet Boy’s birthday. Happy birthday, Nick! 42 was full of highs and lows, but I hope there’s nothing but highs ahead for 43!

Not only is today Nick’s birthday, but it’s also an anniversary here at Dreamer’s Sanctuary. Twenty years ago today, I posted the first chapter of Broken. I can’t believe it’s been that long or that I’m this old, but yeah… my “baby” is twenty!

I’ve already written blogs on the significance Broken and its sequel By My Side had in introducing people to my writing and molding me into the writer I am today, so I won’t go too deep into all that again here. I reread both novels three years ago when I was writing the retrospective blogs for my site’s twentieth anniversary, and while they are definitely a product of the time and my age when I wrote them and don’t reflect my current writing style anymore, I really enjoyed revisiting them. Broken Nick and Claire are still my favorite couple from any of my fanfics, and their stories will always have a special place in my heart.

My writing has certainly evolved in the twenty years since I started Broken, but the lessons I learned while writing it and its sequel continue to have a lasting impact on me now. I’ve been thinking about these stories a lot lately as I write The World Will Be Waiting because it has the same themes of trying to move on after a traumatic, life-altering experience and navigating a career and a new relationship with a physical disability. I doubt I would have written this story or its predecessor, My Brother’s Keeper, had it not been for Broken and BMS. They definitely paved the way by giving me the confidence to tackle the topics these stories explore. I’ve said it to myself before, but Broken Nick learned to walk again so that Quadriplegic Kevin could roll. LOL

It’s fitting that I’m posting Chapter 17 of The World Will Be Waiting today, on Broken’s anniversary, not only because Chapter 17 was an important chapter in Broken, but because I also drew some inspiration from By My Side when I wrote it. This chapter contains the first sex scene of the story. I will be the first to admit that I am not a smut writer; I don’t write sex scenes very often and still find them awkward when I do. (I will also admit I left a really cringey sentence in this chapter specifically because it made me giggle every time I reread it – I’ll leave you to figure out which one it was.) But I knew going into this story that I would have to include some because Kevin rediscovering his sexuality seemed like such an important part of the overall plot. And I knew this because the same was true for Nick in BMS.

I was only eighteen years old when I finished Broken and started writing BMS. I had gradually moved from reading fairly PG-13 teenybopper fanfics to more mature romance fics that included detailed sex scenes. As I made my initial outline for BMS, I remember thinking, I want to try writing a sex scene at some point, but it won’t be for this story. Having come across the term “devotee” in my research, I was hesitant to write my first ever sex scene with an amputee character, I guess because I worried it would come across as fetishy. Of course, as I’ve since learned, whenever I vow I’ll never do something, I will inevitably do it at some point down the road. I did eventually write my first sex scene – three of them, if I remember correctly – in BMS because it felt too important to gloss over in a story about a guy with one leg learning to love himself again as he found love with a woman. Getting over that hurdle helped me gain the confidence to keep writing scenes like that when they seem necessary for the story I want to tell instead of always “fading to black” like I had prior to BMS. So thank you, Broken Nick, for continuing to inspire me all these years later.

Just for fun, I leave you with these screenshots from my Sims 4 game of Nick and Claire loving life and Kevin and Natalie… falling in love? ❤️  Thanks for following my characters, old and new, over the years!

Today, my writing streak made it to 365 days!  Between My Brother’s Keeper and its sequel, The World Will Be Waiting, I have added something to this Kevin story every day for the past year.  I didn’t think it was possible for me to stick with it this long, but ever since I figured out a writing routine that works for me, it’s actually been easy.  It helps to have a story that I really care about and want to work on consistently.  Maybe once this one is done, I’ll try it with Guilty Roads and see how far I get. 🙃

Chapter 16 of The World Will Be Waiting is up!  We are now solidly into the romance part of the story.  I promise the other Boys will be back at some point – I just started writing the “recording in London” part last weekend – but for now, the focus is on Kevin and his new relationship.  These next few chapters have a sweet “slice of life” feel, which is so far from my norm that I really enjoyed writing them.  I hope you’ll enjoy reading them!

Thanks for the comments on my last chapter of The World Will Be Waiting!  Chapter 15 is up.  This is one of my favorite chapters so far.  In 2015, I drove down to Lexington with a couple friends to see Kevin and Brian’s induction into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame, and we went to Cathedral Domain, the camp where Kevin grew up.  It’s a really cool place, and it was fun reminiscing on that trip as I wrote this chapter.  I hope you’ll enjoy reading it!

Happy New Year!  I hope the first week of 2023 has treated you well.  So far, my resolutions are intact, and I’m feeling good.

Chapter 14 of The World Will Be Waiting is up.  I hope you enjoy it!  I always appreciate hearing any feedback you have.  Thanks for reading!