Dreamer's Sanctuary

It’s not much, but it is a new Nick death!  I added #Death 68 to our round-robin collaboration 1000 Ways to Kill Nick Carter.  It’s called “Butterfingers,” and you can read it here or on Absolute Chaos.

It feels good to finally post something this year!  Prior to July, I’d been slacking off.  This month, I have been working some on the BSB/ER crossover story I mentioned last summer, and that is going pretty well.  It’s a project I’m probably not going to start posting until it’s finished because of how flaky I have been, but it’s going to be more of a novella than a novel, so I’m hoping to finish it this summer or fall.  Thanks for your patience!

In case you hadn’t guessed, my last post was just my annual April Fool’s prank.  If you missed it, click here to see a screenshot of what the site looked like earlier today.  All my April Fool’s jokes are also archived on the About page.  If you’d like to know my real opinion on the Melissa Schuman controversy, take everything I said in my last post and pretend it said the opposite (or just read the comment section).  I definitely won’t be writing Dream fanfic anytime soon, or ever.

I haven’t been writing much BSB fanfic lately either, but that has nothing to do with Nick.  My laptop died at the beginning of January, and I still haven’t replaced or fixed it, which has really hindered my writing.  I haven’t posted any more of My Brother’s Keeper because I’ve been stuck on Chapter 4 for the past few months; I’m going to wait until I’m back on track with that one to put a link on my stories page and start “officially” posting it.  Hopefully that will be this summer, if not before.  Thanks for bearing with me, and thanks for the comments on my April Fool’s update!

Hello, and Happy Easter! Long time no see. Sorry about that. 2018 has been a difficult year for me so far. First I lost my laptop, then my beloved cat… and if I’m being honest with myself, I also lost my love for the Backstreet Boys. One Backstreet Boy in particular.

When Melissa Schuman made her sexual assault allegations against Nick last fall, I tried to ignore them at first. I wanted to believe that Nick was innocent, that he would never rape a woman, and that, if he did, he would take responsibility for his actions and admit his mistake. When he denied the allegations, I wanted to take his side.

But I couldn’t. You see, I am a woman. That means I must automatically side with other women. I’ve never met Melissa Schuman and don’t know much about her, but she has a vagina, and I have a vagina, so I must assume she’s telling the truth. Regardless of fact or logic, I must believe her. In spite of how many years I’ve followed Nick’s career or how many times I’ve met him, I can’t ignore the allegations against him anymore. I must support his accuser. #MeToo

This makes it difficult to remain a BSB fan. How can I continue to support a group whose most popular member is an accused rapist? How can I continue to write fan fiction about said rapist? I can’t. #TimesUp

Therefore, I’ve decided to make some major changes to Dreamer’s Sanctuary. I’m not going to quit writing fanfic or take down the site, but I am going to get rid of all mentions of Melissa’s rapist and his group. From now on, to show my continued support for Melissa and all women, I will be writing fan fiction about her former girl group, Dream. My old stories are currently being revised to reflect this change, and all new stories will star Melissa and the three other strong, talented women in the group. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know Melissa, Holly, Ashley, and Diana through my stories.

To quote one of my favorite Dream songs, “That was then; this is now.” Welcome to the new era of Dreamer’s Sanctuary!

Edit: April Fool! #IStandWithNickCarter

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone reading this had a great holiday season.  I’ve had a productive Christmas break, writing-wise.  I started not one, but two new novels!  Clearly, I’m still having some trouble figuring out what I want to write next, but at least I’ve narrowed it down to two ideas.  Neither of them are far along enough for me to start posting officially, but I am going to give you a sneak peek of the one I’ve been working on the most lately because it happens to start on New Year’s Eve.  It’s called My Brother’s Keeper, and it’s a Kevin story!  Somehow, in the eighteen years I’ve been writing fanfic, I have never written a novel about Kevin before.  (I can’t count Guilty Roads because he’s been in a coma most of the story.)  But that’s about to change!  Technically, this is a Kevin/Nick story and will be equally balanced between the two of them.  And of course, it’s a drama.  (As if I would ever write something light-hearted and happy – ha!)  I posted the first two chapters for you to check out here.  I will not be posting it on Absolute Chaos or even adding it to my stories page until it’s a little farther along and I know I can continue updating it regularly.  I want to be better at that this time around!

I’m not really a New Year’s resolution kind of person, but last year, I made a resolution to write every day, and I kept it until March.  I’m going to make the same resolution again this year and see if I can keep it going even longer.  My goal is always to be able to update at least weekly, which is why I need to wait until I’ve banked some more chapters to post the new story everywhere.  But so far, it’s going well!  I hope you enjoy the beginning, and I hope to be back soon with more!  Please feel free to leave feedback at the bottom of the chapters if you like what you read.

Thanks, as always, for visiting my site and reading my stories!  Your support is a huge part in what keeps me wanting to write.  I hope 2018 treats all of us well!

Just in time for Halloween, I’m back from the dead!  Sorry for not posting anything in three months.  I kind of knew I would probably want to take a writing hiatus after I finished Sick as My Secrets, but since I finished it so early in the summer, I also thought I might go ahead and start a new story.  Thanks for voting in the poll I put up in July.  I played around with just about all of those ideas at some point over the summer, but didn’t make much progress with any of them, hence my unannounced hiatus.  I still plan to write at least some of them when time and inspiration are on my side (ER crossover for sure; that one’s already in the works), but I’m not working on anything right now.  Knowing how I’ve been the last few years, I probably won’t do much writing until winter break and maybe not until next summer.  But when I’m not working and have that extra time and energy to devote to it… bring it on!

In the meantime, I did start a short story toward the end of summer that I did not finish in time to post before school started again.  Shocker, I know.  The good news is that after not writing anything for two months, I opened it up last night and started working on it again, and I was able to finish it tonight.  This is actually great news for me because the story is kind of timely, and if I didn’t finish it this month, it would have been an epic failure on my part.  So thanks, Christopher Columbus, for the three-day weekend!

The new short is called The Call, and it’s posted in its entirety on the Short Stories page.  I hope you enjoy it!

In all honesty, I probably won’t post anything else for awhile unless this triggers a sudden burst of writing productivity, but I promise I’m not quitting fanfic – just taking a break so I can live my life without feeling guilty all the time for not updating like I did the last two years of writing SAMS.  If I ever decide it’s more than “just a break,” I will let you know.  I won’t just disappear like so many writers do.  Thanks for sticking with me, and again, I hope you like the new story!