Dreamer's Sanctuary

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!

Well, we’ve made it through another month since my last post, and we’re almost halfway through this horrible year.  I wonder what horrors the second half of 2020 has in store for us!

It seems frivolous to talk about fanfic at a time when there are so many more important things happening in the real world, but if you’re like me, you just need to take a break from reality sometimes.  Writing is my way of escaping for a while, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately.  I started a new novel a few weeks ago that I’m hoping will be ready to start posting at some point later this year, but I have a different story to debut today!

*cue dramatic music*

As I’ve mentioned before, I have been working on a BSB/ER crossover!  ER has been my favorite TV show since I was ten, at least two years before the Backstreet Boys entered my life, so it only made sense for me to write a fanfic that combines two of my greatest pop culture loves – with lots of medical drama, of course!  It’s like the perfect recipe for a Julie story, right?  I’m surprised it took me as long as it did to bring it to fruition.  I’ve actually been writing this story off and on since 2012.  It has always been a side project, something I’ve played around with whenever I’m between stories, and so it’s taken me forever to get far enough into it to feel comfortable posting it.  I didn’t want to make the same mistake I did with my last crossover, which I posted too soon and then promptly abandoned.  But since I’m less than three chapters away from finishing this one and have been super productive lately, I feel like I should be safe to start posting it.  In case you couldn’t tell, I’m excited to finally be able to share with you!

First, a couple of notes:

1.  Please don’t let the word “crossover” scare you away from giving this one a try.  It’s okay if you’ve never seen an episode of ER.  Although the story features characters from the TV show, it’s very BSB-centered.  You won’t need to know anything about the show to be able to follow the plot, but of course, it’ll be more fun if you do!  (For those who have never watched ER, it’s streaming on Hulu.  I highly recommend you give it a chance, not because of this story, but because it’s hands down the best TV medical drama of all time!)

2.  This is going to be a novella, not a full novel.  I’ve planned for ten chapters plus an epilogue, and so far I’ve finished eight of them.  My goal was to make the story read like an episode of ER, so it takes place over a short period of time compared to most of my medical dramas.  But trust me, I’ve packed a ton of intense medical drama into those ten chapters!  I was ready for a break from writing medical stuff after finishing A Heart That Isn’t Mine, but I’m back in the saddle again.  (Sorry, Boys.)

The story is called Heroic Measures, and I’m posting the first chapter promptly at 10/9c on a Thursday night… which my fellow longtime ER fans from America will know as ER’s sacred time slot.  For fifteen years, I plopped down in front of my TV at this time on Thursday night and turned on NBC for a new episode of ER, and in honor of that nostalgic memory, my plan is post a new chapter every Thursday at this time until the story is finished.  I hope you enjoy it!

Synopsis:
In the fall of 1995, the Backstreet Boys’ future is looking bright. Fresh off the release of their very first single, the five young men from Florida have embarked on a promotional tour, feeling like their dreams of stardom are about to come true. Instead, they come to a crashing halt on a rain-soaked bridge in Chicago, where a horrible accident puts their career plans on hold and leaves their lives in the hands of the dedicated doctors and nurses at County General Hospital.

Curtain Call!

In a come-from-behind win, congratulations to Curtain Call for being voted the top story on Dreamer’s Sanctuary in the 20th Anniversary Story Tournament.  It was very close, with only one vote separating the winner and runner-up, A Heart That Isn’t Mine, but in the end, sweet won over sadistic, as it probably should.  Thank you to everyone who voted!  It was fun for me to see readers’ preferences and watch how the tournament played out, and hopefully it helped relieve your quarantine boredom for a few minutes.

Now that the tournament is over and the twentieth anniversary has passed, I will probably take a little break from updating until I have a new story to post.  Hopefully that will be sooner rather than later!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms in the U.S. who may be reading this!  I hope you have a wonderful day!

After four rounds of voting, thirty stories have been eliminated from the tournament.  It all comes down to the top two:  Curtain Call vs. A Heart That Isn’t Mine.

Which one is worthy of being Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s number one story?

You have through Saturday to vote.  The winner will be announced next Sunday!