It’s 00Carter update day! We’re back with Part 2 of Episode 12: “Mr. Body Beautiful!” With their leader’s life at risk, the agents of HimTak scramble to formulate a plan to safely remove the bomb implanted in K’s body. Seatbelts, everyone! We’re about to embark on a wild ride! We hope you enjoy the new chapter!
Happy Birthday, AJ!
I held off a day on updating so I could take this opportunity to wish our favorite “bad boy” a happy birthday! Chapter 30 of My Brother’s Keeper is finally up, and AJ is in it! Actually, all the Boys are. Hope you enjoy! I’ll be back tomorrow with the next part of our new 00Carter episode, “Mr. Body Beautiful.”
00Carter’s back! (Alright!)
Oh my god, we’re back again! As promised, the 00Carter crew (Rose, Dee, and I) have returned with our first new episode in almost a decade!
Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of 00Carter’s conception on the Absolute Chaos forum. If you’d asked me on January 2, 2007 if I thought I’d be writing this story about Nick as a secret agent fifteen years later, I would have said, “No way.” To be honest, I had no intention of writing it then. I thought it was a cute idea Rose came up with, and I had fun helping her brainstorm for it, but I didn’t plan on being part of it. I wasn’t a James Bond fan and knew nothing about the world of secret agents and espionage. I didn’t much care for AU either, unless it was a medical drama about the Boys being doctors. I was in the middle of writing By My Side and was happy in my little Nick & Claire bubble. I wasn’t looking for a new project. But the more we talked about it, the more I got into the idea of Nick being this charming Bond-esque secret agent. I even made a little Flash animation of the famous Bond gun barrel sequence with Nick in it instead, which you can see in my 2008 Windows Movie Maker intro video below. (LOL) I had fun doing that, so I offered to design a website for the story and help edit it, both things that were more in my wheelhouse. Of course, Rose can be very convincing, and she talked me into joining the writing team as well. The rest is history!
Like most collaborations, 00Carter started off strong and then gradually began to fall apart. We started the story with a team of eleven writers, which was fun and exciting at first but eventually proved to be way too many people trying to work together. The problem wasn’t with any one person. It was just an organizational nightmare trying to keep everyone on the same page. Communication was difficult. We came from four different countries on two different continents in completely different time zones, so trying to get the whole group together for a chat to plan episodes was almost impossible. Because we spoke different languages and had different writing styles and experience levels, there was a lack of continuity between scenes and characters. We didn’t all know each other well before we started writing together, which made it hard to give constructive criticism without worrying about hurt feelings. We got along well for the most part, but, of course, we occasionally had conflicting ideas and differences of opinion. Once the honeymoon phase ended, the initial enthusiasm some writers had for the story faded. Life got in the way, and it took longer and longer for people to write their parts. Rose and I ran a tight ship; we started making rules and setting deadlines in an effort to finish episodes in a reasonable amount of time, but this just pushed people away. They started leaving the project. By the time we finished “A 00Carter Christmas,” the last episode we posted before our unofficial hiatus, in December 2012, we were down to just four writers, who were burnt out from the effort of trying to keep a sinking ship afloat. So we took a break. A very long break.
Throughout the hiatus, I never lost my love for 00Carter. It’s one of the funniest, quirkiest, and most creative stories I’ve ever helped write, and I’m proud to be a part of it. Despite the update drought, I never considered 00Carter to be discontinued or abandoned. It’s always been listed on the right side of this site as one of my “in progress” projects. Rose and I talked about it often over the years, and every time it came up in our conversations, we both said we wanted to continue it someday, even if it was just the two of us writing together. We thought it might even be easier with just the two of us. After all, we managed to complete another long, successful collaboration, Song for the Undead, in the meantime. But life got in the way for both of us. We got busy with other projects, and the timing never felt right to come back to 00Carter.
Then the pandemic struck. During lockdown, Dee rediscovered her love of fanfic and returned to Absolute Chaos, where we had first become friends and conceived the idea for 00Carter. When we started talking about trying to revive the story, she, Rose, and I all expressed an interest in continuing it. It took us a while to move from just talking about it to actually planning and then writing, but once we did this past summer, it felt fresh and exciting again, like it had in the beginning. Only this time, the experience has been even better because we’re all older, wiser, and more in sync than we were before. It’s a lot easier to keep three people on the same page than eleven. In addition to writing new episodes, we decided to go back and edit the old ones. We didn’t change any plot points, just polished the writing by fixing grammar and continuity errors. It’s been fun reminiscing on the old episodes as we repost them each week, but we’re ready to finally debut the first episode we’ve finished since our big return!
Episode 12 of 00Carter is called “Mr. Body Beautiful,” and as you might have inferred, it’s focused on our beloved Kevin, otherwise known as Agent K.
Synopsis: When Dr. Rough’s undercover agent implants K with a microscopic bomb, 00Carter, Jay, and Styx must shrink to go inside K’s body and deactivate it.
I’m obviously biased, but I think this is the best episode of 00Carter yet! It will certainly go down as one of my favorites – and not just because it includes medical drama. But for those of you who liked stories like A Heart That Isn’t Mine, this is the 00Carter episode that comes the closest, albeit with a lot more comedy. Dee, Rose, and I had so much fun writing this one together and have been eagerly waiting to share it with the world for a few months now. Hopefully it was worth the wait! We’re posting Part 1 today and will be back every Monday with another part until it’s up in its entirety. The episode is already finished, so we promise not to leave you hanging! If you read it, please leave us a comment here, on the 00Carter site, or on AO3 and let us know what you think! After almost ten years, any feedback from actual readers would mean the world to us! Thanks in advance for giving our story a chance!
Happy New Year!
New year, new 00Carter! That feels good to say on my first update of 2022! I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to say it again. Technically, we’re not posting the first part of the new episode until Monday, but tonight we finally have the updated version of Episode 10: “Catch Her If You Can” ready to post for you. This is our longest episode to date, so it took us longer than expected to finish editing. It’s a fun one, though, so hopefully it’s worth the wait! You can check it out on the 00Carter site or AO3.
Thank you to everyone who read and commented on yesterday’s blog. I hope you had fun ringing in the new year! I’ve been making great progress on My Brother’s Keeper the last few days (of course, just in time for my break to end), so I should be ready to post the next chapter of that next weekend. In the meantime, I’ll be back on Monday with the first part of Episode 12 of 00Carter, “Mr. Body Beautiful,” and I could not be more excited about it! What a great way to start the new year!
New Year’s Eve Reflections
Happy New Year! Unfortunately, I don’t have any story updates today. The next chapter of My Brother’s Keeper is almost done, as are our edits for the last old 00Carter episode, “Catch Her If You Can,” but neither are quite ready to post just yet. For my last post of 2021, I just wrote a blog about my writing.
The second line of my current novel says, “I guess everyone gets a little reflective on New Year’s Eve, and I was no exception.” The first line of Chapter 74 of Curtain Call is also “I guess everyone gets a little reflective on New Year’s Eve.” Weird how Kevin and Nick think alike, huh? LOL
In spite of writing this same sentence at least twice in the last ten years, I am not the type to get super reflective on New Year’s Eve. It’s not one of my favorite holidays. I’m not big on resolutions either. But, nevertheless, I found myself feeling “a little reflective” this week as I finally delved back into fanfic after a busy start to my winter break.
I worked mostly on 00Carter this month, editing old episodes and finishing my last part for one of the new ones. Of the few of you who will read this blog, there are even fewer who will read 00Carter. I get it. I’ve always admitted that if I were not one of its writers, I would probably not read 00Carter either for a multitude of reasons. It’s about secret agents, which is not my thing. It’s also AU, which I don’t enjoy as much as canon BSB fics. It was on hiatus for nine years and is unlikely to ever be labeled “complete,” which would make me hesitant to click on it. But I would be missing out because, in my not-so-humble-or-unbiased opinion, 00Carter is a gem of a story. It was always a lot of fun, but our recent edits have raised the overall quality of the writing from good to great and reminded me just how much I enjoy it. If you haven’t read it, I really hope you’ll give it a try! It’s definitely different from most of my other stories, but that’s one of the reasons I love writing it. It’s lighthearted, which is a nice break from the heavy drama of most of my other novels, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
But the point of this blog is not to promote 00Carter. I’m not sure it even has a “point” besides being reflective. There is no big announcement at the end of this post and no new story chapter to accompany it. It’s really just me putting some thoughts about my writing into words before the end of the year. I doubt anyone else will even want to read them, but my personal website seemed like the best place to put them, since they’re at least relevant to the work posted here.
While revisiting 00Carter this past year, I realized I’ve entered into a new chapter as a writer. For a long time, I divided my fanfic “career” into two eras: before Broken and after Broken. Broken has always represented a pivotal point in my writing journey. It was the first story that really took off for me and attracted a lot of new readers, and it taught me so much about writing. You can literally see the growth I made from the first chapter to the last. Its sequel, By My Side, continued that growth and turned me into the writer I am today. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. There was a time when I wasn’t sure I could ever top Broken and BMS, which felt like the peak of my fanfic “career.” I still consider that series my “magnum opus” in many ways, but it’s not my best work anymore and doesn’t really reflect the writer I am now, almost nineteen years after starting Broken and fourteen years after finishing By My Side. (Seriously, how has it been that long??)
Looking back, I would now divide my fanfic “career” into four chapters. Chapter 1 was the beginning, the pre-Broken era, which lasted from late 1999 to the end of 2002. This is when I first started writing as a hobby. I was very prolific during this period, churning out a new “novel” almost every month (which, judging by word count, were mostly just novellas or short stories broken up in multiple parts), over a dozen short stories, and a handful of collaborations with varying degrees of success. It was definitely “quantity over quality” back in those days. That wasn’t my goal; I did the best I could to come up with good stories, but I was still a kid, and my writing reflects that inexperience and immaturity.
Chapter 2 was the Broken era, which went from January 2003 to January 2008, when I finished By My Side. This chapter took me from my last semester of high school to halfway through my first year of teaching and included four years of college, a time of tremendous personal growth. As I’ve already said, it was a time of tremendous growth for me as a writer, too. During that era, I went from a teenybopper beginning writer who had some good ideas but didn’t know how to deliver them to a young adult writer who had a better handle on character development and description but suffered from the occasional bout of purple prose.
On the back half of the Broken era came Chapter 3, which I’m calling the Absolute Chaos era. It technically started around the beginning of 2007 with 00Carter and ran until at least the summer of 2017, when I finished Sick as My Secrets. This was a time when Absolute Chaos was the place to go to read, post, and discuss BSB fanfic. Through the forum there, I made new friends and found new favorite fanfic writers and collaborators. I also learned a lot as I continued to develop my own writing. During this era, I really tried to make myself a more well-rounded writer by branching out from my medical drama/het romance roots and delving into other genres, including action, comedy, mystery, horror, slash, and alternate universe. Sure, most of the novels I wrote were still medical dramas, but with the exception of Curtain Call (clearly, I couldn’t resist writing another Nick cancer story), they all had some sort of twist that set them apart from my earlier “sickfics.” I also got back into writing short stories, but unlike the sappy one-shots I wrote in the beginning, these were mostly dark comedies and quirky forum challenge entries. Between 00Carter, The Pandaskunk Saga, and the AC fairy tale challenge, I certainly improved my parody skills during this period. This was the first chapter in which I was a full-fledged adult, and there were times when “adulting” got in the way of fangirling. My writing definitely slowed down during this period, but it became more about quality over quantity.
That brings me to the current chapter of my writing journey, which I don’t really have a name for yet. I could call Chapter 4 the pandemic era, but technically it began way before COVID with A Heart That Isn’t Mine, which I started in the summer of 2018. This new chapter followed the brief hiatus I took after finishing Sick as My Secrets and struggling to get started on a new project. I didn’t write much in the year between SAMS and AHTIM. By the time I was ready to start posting AHTIM, reviews had been disabled on Absolute Chaos due to a spam problem, and many readers and writers had moved on from the fanfic community or the BSB fandom altogether. I’m not sure if it’s because of the decreased readership and feedback or simply the result of maturity, but this is when I really learned to write for myself. Obviously, I don’t write solely for myself, or I wouldn’t post my work online for other people to read. But over the past few years, I’ve gotten to the point where I can just enjoy my own stories without aiming to please anyone else. Feedback is the icing on the cake for me. I love it, but I don’t live for it. When I don’t get any after an update, it’s a little disappointing but not discouraging. I’ve become the kind of writer who’s confident and passionate enough to keep writing for the love of it even when it feels like no one is reading. Writing for myself has given me more freedom and courage to take risks and write whatever I want to write, whether it’s intense medical drama, sweet bromance, or crazy comedy. Some of the stuff I’ve written during this period has been depressing, some of it depraved, and some downright silly, but I’ve sure had a lot of fun doing it. It’s given me an outlet during times of personal grief and the current pandemic, and it’s helped me rediscover my passion for writing as I continue to hone the craft of it. I’ve also found a better balance between my personal and professional lives so that I can make more time for my hobby and update more regularly.
As we head into another new year, I look forward to continuing 00Carter and finishing My Brother’s Keeper. I appreciate everyone who visits this site and reads my stories, especially anyone who’s actually still reading this long-winded blog. I wish you all a happy new year! 2021 has been hard, and I’m not at all sad to leave it behind. Here’s to a better 2022 and (hopefully) the Backstreet Boys’ long-awaited return to the stage!