Dreamer's Sanctuary

My Brother’s Keeper is officially finished!  I hope you enjoy the last chapter, Chapter 50, and the chapter-length “Behind the Story” blog I added at the end.  I’m gonna start doing these for all my novels in place of my usual author’s note at the end of the story.  It’s fun to share my process and preserve my memories while they’re still fairly fresh in my mind, and hopefully some of you enjoy reading about the behind-the-scenes stuff.

Thank you so much to everyone who read this story!  I really enjoyed writing it.  This one’s been in my head for a long time, so it feels good to finally finish it.  I would love to read your thoughts, so please feel free to leave a comment here or on AO3, email me, tweet me, or however you feel comfortable giving feedback.  I always appreciate it!

As for my future fanfic projects, I have started a sequel to My Brother’s Keeper called The World Will Be Waiting.  I’m not very far into it yet (just started Chapter 3), so I’m going to wait a while before I start posting it.  I would give you a sneak peek, but I learned my lesson from doing that with MBK.  Instead, I will start posting when I feel comfortable with how the story’s going and have completed enough chapters to be able to guarantee regular updates for a while.  Usually, that’s around ten chapters, but with summer winding down and school starting up soon for me, it may take me a few months to get that far.

My daily writing streak is still going strong at 188 days, and I’m determined to keep that going even when life gets busy again.  For any of my fellow writers who struggle to find time to write every day, here’s my pro tip:  I write while I’m getting ready for work in the morning.  I started doing this during the end-of-story streak for A Heart That Isn’t Mine because I was so obsessed with finishing that story, I would write whenever and wherever I could, including sitting on the closed toilet seat with my chromebook on the bathroom counter and pecking at the keyboard with one hand while I blow-dried my hair with the other.  On a good day, I could get a few paragraphs written this way, so I kept doing it.  This is how I manage to keep my writing streaks going on busy days, when I come home from work too tired to write or simply don’t have time.  Although I always seem to revert back to my night owl nature in the summer, my mind is usually freshest in the morning (after I’ve had coffee), and knowing I only have a few minutes helps me focus.  Some days, I may only write a sentence – or maybe just one word – but the simple act of opening my story each day and adding something to it keeps it in my head and helps motivate me to open it again the next day.  I’ve found it much easier to stay inspired this way.

I’m honestly not sure when you’ll see updates on any of my other stories.  Hopefully we’ll write another episode of 00Carter at some point, but that seems to be on hold at the moment.  And as much as I would love to say I’ve been secretly working on Guilty Roads or Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Backstreet Boy behind the scenes, that would be a lie.  Maybe someday I’ll feel inspired to finish those.  In the meantime, I’m looking forward to continuing Kevin’s story and hope you are, too!  Thanks, as always, for your support!

Chapter 49 of My Brother’s Keeper is up!  This is a fun, feel-good chapter, and you will probably want to watch this video from the Unbreakable tour before/while you read it:

One of my favorite moments in all of BSB history!  I have so much love for Kevin.  Watching this makes me so happy to have him back.  Do you think he could/would ever come back to the group under the circumstances of my story?  If so, what would that be like?  Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!

I’ll be back next week with the last chapter of My Brother’s Keeper!  I will probably post it Thursday because I will be out of town Friday through Sunday seeing BSB in Chicago and St. Louis!  So excited!  Will anyone else be at either of those shows?

Thanks for reading!  Hope you enjoy the new chapter!

Chapter 48 of My Brother’s Keeper is up!  There are just two chapters left after this one, one Kevin chapter and one Nick chapter, so it’s definitely winding down.  I hope you enjoy the new chapter!

I’m feeling grateful for a couple of reasons today.  First, it’s a blessing to finally have the Boys together and back on tour!  So far, the U.S./Canadian leg of the DNA tour seems to have gone off without a hitch, and I hope it continues to go well!  The Boys are currently in my part of the country for their first batch of Midwest shows this summer.  I wasn’t planning to see them until the end of the month, when they come to Chicago and St. Louis, but I made the somewhat spontaneous decision to drive up to Milwaukee with a friend last night for their show, and I’m so glad I did!  We both scored front row seats (behind the pit) for under $300 a couple days before the show, which is crazy to me!  I am not a “wait until the last minute” concert ticket buyer, especially not for BSB.  The trauma of having the entire Millennium tour sell out in a matter of seconds the first time I tried to get tickets to one of their shows as a young teenager has stuck with me, and I always try to get my tickets the instant they go on sale (usually in a pre-sale) because I’m worried they’ll sell out if I wait.  So being this spontaneous was a new experience for me, but it couldn’t have worked out better!

Not only were we in the front row (behind the pit), but Kevin’s kids stood right in front of us the whole night.  They were both really cute, trying to get his attention and totally rocking out to BSB.  Max is clearly Kevin’s number one fan and danced and clapped all night as if he hasn’t seen this show at least twenty times this year alone.  Mason has gotten really tall, like his dad!  I recognized Max right away, but it took me longer to verify that the lanky kid standing next to him was actually Mason.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been writing about him as a baby for the last year and half, LOL.  Since my writing has been so Kevin-centered lately, I definitely had a moment during the show where I looked at Mason in front of me and then up at Kevin dancing on the stage and then over at Kristin, who was off in the far back corner of the pit, and thought about My Brother’s Keeper.  I have these moments from time to time – the last time I did VIP was in Vegas in 2017, like ten days after finishing Sick as My Secrets, and all I wanted to do was give Howie the biggest hug, LOL.  But aside from feeling grateful that real life does not resemble my fanfiction, I also realized that the way I see the characters in my stories is different from the way I see the guys (and their families) in real life.  It’s hard to explain, but even though I model my characters after real people and try to make them realistic, they sort of take on a life of their own that I can separate from the real people they’re based on.  I guess that’s why the guilt I sometimes feel when I write these horrifically tragic stories about real people I love has never stopped me from writing them:  because, at the end of the day, they’re still just fiction.

The second reason I’m feeling grateful today is that it’s July 9, the anniversary of when AJ went to rehab for the first time.  I still vividly remember watching TRL on July 9, 2001 when Nick, Kevin, Brian, and Howie made an appearance to announce that they were postponing the Black & Blue tour because AJ was going into treatment.  Besides being disappointed that the concert I had tickets to in a few weeks was getting bumped back a few months, I was worried about AJ and sad for the other guys.  Obviously, sobriety has been a difficult journey for AJ since then.  I wrote him sober in My Brother’s Keeper because he claimed to be sober in real life at that time, but in light of his more recent revelations, who knows?  All I know is that he looked and sounded really good and healthy onstage last night!  This is the best he has looked in the last two decades.  So I’m proud of AJ and grateful that he seems to have gotten it together.

Sorry for the long blog, but Chapter 47 of My Brother’s Keeper is up!  This is technically a filler chapter meant to move time forward a few months, but I love the way it turned out. I hope you enjoy it, too!

Happy July!  I just learned that this month is Disability Pride Month, at least in the United States.  I included a list of content creators with disabilities in one of my author’s notes for My Brother’s Keeper last July, but I wanted to spotlight a couple others that I’ve discovered since then.  Check out their YouTube channels!

Squirmy and Grubs
These two started popping up in my recommended videos after I subscribed to the channel Roll With Cole and Charisma.  Both are interabled couples and so entertaining, they should have their own TLC show!  Squirmy and Grubs, a.k.a. Hannah and Shane, have an awesome sense of humor and a beautiful love story.

Makayla Noble
Makayla Noble is a cheerleader who made the news last September when she sustained a spinal cord injury in a tumbling accident.  I started following her story shortly after hearing about it on the news and continue to be inspired by her positive attitude and the progress she’s made in such a short time.  She is a great example of making the best out of whatever bad situation life throws your way.

In other news, I finished My Brother’s Keeper early yesterday!  Although I wrote the majority of the story in about sixteen months, it actually took nine years from the idea’s conception to its completion.  That’s the longest I’ve spent developing a story that actually made it to the end, so finishing it felt really good!  Even though it’s done, I’m probably going to stick to posting one chapter a week for the rest of the month to give myself more time to get started on my next story, which will be its sequel.  I actually started that yesterday, and my writing streak is still going strong at 162 days!  I haven’t played The Sims in like two weeks, which has also helped my productivity, LOL.

With that being said, Chapter 46 is up!  Thank you to everyone who’s still reading, especially those of you who have taken time to leave feedback, whether that’s here, on AO3, Twitter, or wherever.  I hope you know how much I appreciate you!

Happy belated Canada Day to my Canadian readers and an early happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans!  Sending birthday wishes to Mason tomorrow as well – happy birthday, buddy!