Dreamer's Sanctuary

I’m over the moon that it’s June!  It finally feels like summer, even though it doesn’t officially start for a few more weeks.  I spent most of this week doing professional development for work, so it wasn’t the most productive week in terms of writing, but the streak is still alive!  I’m almost to 500 days!  I left you hanging on The World Will Be Waiting last week, but never fear, Chapter 34 is here!  I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you to all the wonderful readers who visit this site and read my stories, whether here or on AO3.  Kudos to those of you who take time to let me know you’re reading and share your thoughts!  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate hearing from you!

Speaking of kudos, I have a mission for you, should you choose to accept it!  I’m on a quest to defeat the dreaded Kudos Bot from wreaking havoc on my stats on AO3.  What is the Kudos Bot, you ask?  It’s a bot that adds large amounts of guest kudos to random stories, usually stories with very few hits, comments, or real kudos.  It attacked a couple of the 00Carter episodes last year, and my stats are still skewed as a result.  Why is this a bad thing, you ask?  Don’t writers want kudos?  Well, yes, but we want real kudos from real readers.  These fake kudos may look legit to people who don’t know any differently, but they mean nothing to me because I know I didn’t earn them.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to delete them, so my stats page continues to look like this:

As much as I adore 00Carter, “In the Wink of an Eye” clearly doesn’t deserve to be in the top five in terms of kudos.  If you know me, you probably know I am a little OCD when it comes to stats and numbers, so it annoys me to no end to see this.  I would love to be able to bump it out of the top five and boost Curtain Call into its rightful fifth place so that at least the bar graph is legit.

Here’s how you can help!  If you’ve read and enjoyed any of my stories in the past, click their titles below and leave a kudo!  Bonus points if you’re logged into your AO3 account, but if you don’t have one of those, you can still leave kudos as a guest.  (But please only leave one kudo per story and only on stories that you actually read.  Again, the goal here is legitimacy; I’m not trying to inflate my stats with fake or duplicate kudos.)

Curtain Call

A Heart That Isn’t Mine

Heroic Measures

My Brother’s Keeper

The Road to Bethlehem

Secrets of the Heart

Sick as My Secrets

Song for the Undead

The World Will Be Waiting

I just linked my novels/novellas, but feel free to visit my full works page if you’d like to leave kudos on any other stories.  I haven’t posted the Broken series on AO3 yet due to its length and the amount of editing it needs.  Too overwhelming for me now, but that could be a summer project at some point.  Anyway, thanks again to anyone willing to help me with my kudos drive!

It’s been a long, hard school year, but I’m breathing a huge sigh of relief today because I made it to my summer break!  No more pencils, no more books…  Well, that’s only half-true; I never write in pencil, but I hope to do lots of writing and reading over the next couple months!  Chapter 33 of The World Will Be Waiting is up.  Hope you enjoy!

Congratulations to the Backstreet Boys on the culmination of their wonderful DNA World Tour!  I feel blessed to have been able to see the show seven times in five different cities over the course of the two legs they did in North America.  I’ve been to at least one concert on every tour since Into the Millennium, and DNA had the best setlist.  (Bonus points for including my favorite song, “Don’t Wanna Lose You Now.”)  Even after four years, I’m sad to see it end but excited for what’s coming next – hopefully new music!  As long as there’ll be music, they’ll be coming back again… and the world will be waiting!

And, hey, speaking of The World Will Be Waiting, Chapter 32 is up!  If you rely on Twitter to be notified of updates, you should know that the plugin I use to automatically tweet a link to my posts no longer works with Twitter (thanks, Elon 🙄).  I will try to get in the habit of tweeting it myself, but if you’re not subscribed to my email list, you may want to do that.  Sign up on the sidebar if you’re on the desktop version of the site or scroll down to the bottom of the page if you’re on the mobile version.

Summer’s almost here, and this tired teacher is beyond ready!  See ya next Saturday with the next chapter!

Chapter 31 of The World Will Be Waiting is up!  I wrote a lot this week, which was much-needed because I’m only three chapters ahead of what I’m posting.  The past month has been busy and stressful, but fortunately, there are only two more weeks until my summer break starts!

In other news, Google Docs is testing out a new AI-assisted writing tool, and I got access to try it out.  While I would never use it to help me write fanfic for real – and, quite frankly, don’t need to – I was curious and wanted to see what it was capable of, having not played with ChatGPT yet.  So I asked it to help me write a Backstreet Boys fan fiction.  I wanted to share what it came up with because it cracked me up!

Read“An AI BSB fanfic?”

May 6, 2023 has been quite a day so far!  A coronation, a Backstreet baby’s birthday, and I hit Day 470 on my writing streak. LOL  Congratulations to King Charles III, happy birthday to James, and Chapter 30 of The World Will Be Waiting is up for your reading pleasure!  Quite fitting that it takes place in London!

Twenty-three years ago, on a Saturday just like this, I signed up for an account on Geocities and created a website to post the handful of fanfics I had written.  Bored and frustrated by the lack of timely updates on the other fanfic sites that hosted my first few stories, I did it on a whim.  I never imagined I would still be updating it twenty-three years later, with over eighty stories and four million words written under my name.  But here we are!  You can click on the About page to see screenshots of how the site has evolved over the years.

The world – and the World Wide Web – has changed a lot since 2000.  Geocities no longer exists.  Most fanfiction is posted on big archive sites such as Archive of Our Own, FanFiction.Net, and Wattpad, not individual sites like Dreamer’s Sanctuary.  Most of the individual sites from the golden era of BSB fanfic have been taken down or abandoned.  That makes me sad, but I’m also proud that my site has outlasted so many of its contemporaries.  BSB fanfic isn’t as popular as it used to be, but I still love writing it and appreciate those of you who still love reading it.  Thank you for visiting my site, reading my stories, and supporting me through all these years!  I’ve learned to write for myself, but I post my work for you.  Your clicks, kudos, and kind words mean the world to me. 💜

With that being said, Chapter 29 of The World Will Be Waiting is up!  I hope you enjoy it!

The Backstreet Boys have officially made it to thirty years together and counting!  Happy anniversary, Boys!  I first became a fan in 1998, and this group has had such a big influence on my life in the last 25 years, providing the soundtrack for so much of my life along with some pretty amazing experiences!  Through BSB, I’ve met people from all around the world whom I never would have had an opportunity to meet otherwise, some of whom have become great friends in real life as well as online.  I’ve traveled to places I’d never been.  And I’ve discovered a hobby that I never imagined I would still be enjoying all these years later.  But here we are!  Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s 23rd anniversary is next Saturday, and I have the Boys to thank for continuing to inspire me and everyone who comes here in search of fanfic about them.  So thank you, Brian, Nick, Kevin, Howie, and AJ for three decades of entertainment and so much more! ❤️

I’ve posted Chapter 28 of The World Will Be Waiting, in which I finally get a chance to use the song that inspired this series in a scene.  Bring some chips and enjoy the cheese!

We’re five days away from the Backstreet Boys’ big 30th anniversary!  While I wish they were celebrating with something a little more exciting than a Top 30 countdown, I’ll take what I can get.  The past few years have been full of ups and downs, but I realize how blessed we are as fans of a boyband to have these five talented guys together, still touring and making new music after all these years.  Here’s to thirty more!

The World Will Be Waiting has been updated with Chapter 27, which features all five guys and is full of bromance.  I hope you enjoy it!

I’m back with Chapter 26 of The World Will Be Waiting!  It’s been fun revisiting the summer the Boys spent recording in London as I write this part of the story.  That was the start of my favorite era of BSB!  I’m enjoying the challenge of trying to weave real events into my fictional storyline and imagining how things might have played out similarly or differently in this alternate universe I’ve created.

I’ve been off work for spring break all week, so I’ve had a lot of time to write and think about this story.  It’s already more than half the length of its predecessor, My Brother’s Keeper, and I still have a lot more planned.  It’s safe to say this one will certainly be longer than MBK, so I hope you’re enjoying it!  I always love to hear from those of you who are reading!

A Happy Passover, Happy Easter, and Ramadan Mubarak to all who celebrate!

Thank you to everyone who sent me messages regarding yesterday’s post.  I appreciate your feedback!  After much consideration, I have decided not to convert my stories to original fiction starring the Frontage Road Fellas.  That means Dreamer’s Sanctuary will remain a Backstreet Boys fanfic site!

Of course, as you realized, that was just an April Fool’s joke. 😜  In all sincerity, thank you for the tweets and messages; I’m glad it gave some of you a laugh!  The site is back to normal now, and the BSB version of Chapter 25 of The World Will Be Waiting is up. If you missed the fun yesterday, you can see a screenshot of the site and read the edited version of the chapter at the bottom of the About page, where I keep a list of my annual April Fool’s pranks.  It’s always fun when they get a reaction, so thanks again to those who took time to reach out!  I’ll be back next weekend with the next chapter of TWWBW!