Throwback Thursday #13: Top Five Favorite Millennium Era Fanfics

Can you believe it? Not only are we halfway through 2025 and this series of twenty-five retrospective blogs for Dreamer’s Sanctuary’s twenty-fifth anniversary, but we’re just one day away from the release of Millennium 2.0 and the start of the new residency! To commemorate the occasion, I’m throwing it way back to the Millennium era for this week’s blog. The Millennium era will always be one of my favorite BSB eras, as it’s when I went from a casual fan to a die-hard fan, attended my first concert, discovered fanfic, and eventually started writing it myself. My first stories took place during the Millennium era, too. Considering I was fourteen when I started writing fanfic, these fics are far from my best work and don’t hold a candle to my adult writing. But I’ve kept them online for all these years because they show where I started and how far I’ve come since then. They also serve as a time capsule, giving younger fans a glimpse into a bygone era. With that being said, here are my top five “favorite” Millennium-inspired stories – and what to read instead of them!

 

5. Don’t Wanna Lose You Now

Named for my favorite Backstreet Boys song, Don’t Wanna Lose You Now is the second fanfic project I finished and posted online. It’s actually the reason I started Dreamer’s Sanctuary! The site that had hosted my first fanfic, Heartache, was no longer being updated by the time I started writing DWLYN two months later, which goes to show you just how quickly websites came and went back then. In the meantime, I’d made my first online friend in the fandom, Rachel (literally the first person who ever gave me feedback!), who had started her own fanfic website and graciously agreed to host my stories. But I got impatient waiting for her to post new chapters of my work in progress, so I thought, If she can make her own website, maybe I can, too. And I created Dreamer’s Sanctuary!

As for the story itself, Don’t Wanna Lose You Now was basically fourteen-year-old me trying to emulate my favorite author at the time, Lurlene McDaniel, in the form of BSB fanfic. For those who didn’t spend their pre-teen years devouring her paperbacks, Lurlene McDaniel is a YA author who’s best known for writing sappy books about teenagers dealing with chronic illness, death, and other depressing topics. If you’ve ever wondered why I write the kind of stories I do, you can blame it all on this woman. Well, maybe not all. I was a morbid child even before I discovered Lurlene. Naturally curious about death and fascinated by medical stuff, I always loved horror movies and hospital shows. Lurlene McDaniel fed my appetite with a steady diet of easily-digestible, melodramatic “sick lit” novels about characters with cancer and other chronic conditions, including diabetes, cystic fibrosis, HIV, and organ failure. I read my first of her books in fourth grade and continued to read and reread her entire catalogue religiously throughout my middle school years. She may have turned me into a bit of a hypochondriac who constantly thought I had cancer or some other illness, but I absolutely loved her books. When I started reading BSB fanfic, I naturally gravitated toward similarly melodramatic, hurt/comfort stories about Brian’s heart condition, bus crashes, and the like. And when I finally ran out of fanfics to feed my appetite for drama, I started writing my own.

In Don’t Wanna Lose You Now, Brian is diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of blood cancer. Partly inspired by my favorite Lurlene McDaniel novel, Don’t Die, My Love, the rest of the fic is about his battle with it. With the other Boys by his side, Brian undergoes chemotherapy, followed by radiation and, finally, a life-saving bone marrow transplant. Naturally, Nick matches as his bone marrow donor. Frick & Frack 4ever!

Needless to say, this story is not good. It’s cheesy, melodramatic, and overly simplistic – a lot of telling instead of showing. To put it into perspective, the entire 39-chapter “novel” is just under 16,000 words long, which would only amount to three or four chapters for me now. It barely even qualifies as a novella. But, despite its many flaws, DWLYN did pave the way for two of my future fics, Broken and Curtain Call. If you’re looking for a decently-written BSB cancer story, I’d recommend reading one of those instead.

 

4. Heartache

Heartache is the first fanfic I ever finished and posted online. It’s not any better than Don’t Wanna Lose You Now, but it’s not notably worse either. In fact, I put it one place higher on this list for a couple of reasons: First, Heartache will always have a special place in my heart for being my first fic. Second, I like the plot a little better.

It was inspired by a story called Cardio, which was one of the many fics I read during the Millennium era that focused on Brian’s heart condition. This was a fairly common topic to read and write about back then, when Brian’s heart surgery was still fresh in fans’ minds. While Brian’s surgery was a success in real life, his fictional counterpart wasn’t always so fortunate. In Cardio, Brian finds out that his heart condition has worsened to the point that there is nothing else the doctors can do for him. The story is about his journey through the five stages of grief as he comes to terms with his terminal diagnosis. I have a vivid memory of reading this story for the first time in the summer of 1999. I had just gotten contact lenses, so when I read the final chapters of Cardio with tears pouring down my face, I worried I was going to wash my new contacts right out of my eyes. (As you may have figured out by now, I was a very melodramatic fourteen-year-old.)

When I revisited that story months later, I wondered why Brian was never put on the list to receive a heart transplant, which seemingly could have saved his life. That’s what gave me the idea to write Heartache, a story in which Brian ultimately does undergo a heart transplant after his heart condition worsens during the Into the Millennium Tour. The cheesy, very Lurlene McDaniel-esque twist is that the donor heart he receives comes from the identical twin sister of a nursing assistant he befriends (and eventually falls in love with) while awaiting his transplant in the hospital. Their story continues in two even cheesier sequels, which add up to a combined total of just over 23,000 words – the equivalent of one novella. Needless to say, I did a lot of “telling, not showing” in this story, too.

I used to say that, of all the stories I wrote during the Millennium era, Heartache is the one I would most consider rewriting someday because there is something I find compelling about the plot, and I know I could have written it so much better after gaining even just a few more years of writing experience. I actually tried to rewrite some of it in a comedic way for this year’s April Fool’s prank, but it did not go well. After writing Secrets of the Heart and A Heart That Isn’t Mine, I don’t think I have another heart transplant story in me. If you want to read one, I’d suggest reading either of those. They’re both a lot better written than Heartache – and a lot darker than any of Lurlene’s books!

 

3. The One

Inspired by the song of the same name, The One is my eighth fanfic and the first to not include any kind of medical storyline until the final few chapters, in which (SPOILER ALERT!) Brian is shot by a jealous fan during his wedding reception. (Really… WTF is wrong with me?) The rest of the story revolves around Brian rescuing a fan from her abusive, alcoholic mother, a storyline that was inspired by melodramatic, fifteen-year-old me being mad at my own not-at-all-abusive-or-alcoholic mother, probably for making me get up in the morning and do chores instead of sleeping in and lazing around all summer, or something like that.

I didn’t expect this story to rank so high in this blog because it’s not one I’ve ever been particularly sentimental about – but that was before I read it for the first time in many years while preparing for this blog. Halfway through, I had tears of laughter running down my face from how ridiculous and problematic it is, so I ended up placing it at number three purely for its entertainment value.

The protagonist of The One is a seventeen-year-old BSB fan named Katelyn, who lives with her abusive, alcoholic mother. Katelyn’s father was killed in a car accident four years before the story begins, triggering her mother to have an emotional breakdown that exacerbated her mental illness and alcoholism. As a fifteen-year-old who grew up in a stable, two-parent, middle-class family, I lacked the emotional maturity and life experience needed to write about topics such as trauma and abuse with any sort of credibility, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

Like many female main characters in BSB fanfics from that era, Katelyn meets her favorite Backstreet Boy (Brian) by winning concert tickets and a meet-and-greet from a radio station contest. The detailed description I wrote of what she wears to the concert in Chapter 4 is peak Y2k fashion:

She took a shower and got dressed in a white tank top and a short pale blue flowered skirt. She brushed out her short blonde hair and twisted the locks in the front back into light blue butterfly clips. She carefully put on her make-up, making sure she didn’t put on too much, for she knew Brian didn’t like when girls wore too much make-up. She gave her face a light dusting of powder and lightly put blush on her already rosy cheeks. She put eye-liner and mascara on, and finished off her eyes with a frosted blue eye-shadow.

By this time, it was after 7:00 and her mother had left for work. Katelyn put some jewelry on: an illusion necklace with a silver heart on it, a silver ring with her birthstone, an aquamarine, in it, and a silver toe ring, to go with her new outfit. Then she slipped on white platform sandals on and walked into the bathroom. She stood in front of the full length mirror and inspected herself carefully. She looked perfect. The short, pastel skirt showed off her long slender legs and the top was low-cut, but not low enough to make her look trashy. She leaned closer to the mirror and saw that the bruise around her eyes had faded to where it was no longer noticeable. She glanced down at her feet to make sure the ice blue toenail polish she had on hadn’t chipped off. It hadn’t. She looked completely pretty and put together. She went back to her bedroom and grabbed her gray Sac purse.

Rereading these two paragraphs filled me with so much joy and nostalgia. The butterfly clips! The frosted blue eyeshadow! The ice blue nail polish! The toe ring! The platform shoes! The Sak purse! If I didn’t already have my outfits for Millennium 2.0 planned, I would totally try to copy this one. (But, don’t worry, I will be wearing light blue butterfly clips, frosted blue eyeshadow, and platform shoes!) I also got a kick out of lines like, “She knew Brian didn’t like when girls wore too much make-up” and “The top was low-cut, but not low enough to make her look trashy,” too. Judgmental much?

When Katelyn finally meets Brian, she flinches and recoils from his hug. Concerned, he asks her what’s wrong, and she pulls up her shirt to reveal the bruises on her back from her mother’s beatings. She confides in Brian, and they exchange phone numbers – because of course a Backstreet Boy would give out his real number to a random teenage girl he just met! Even better, he finds Katelyn in the crowd during the concert, looks directly at her while he sings “The One,” and gestures for her to call him. Clearly, this whole story was a cry for help for Brian Littrell to come and rescue me from my not-remotely-tragic home life, which is exactly what he does for Katelyn a few days later. Brian drives her from her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio to his parents’ house in Lexington, Kentucky and tells her she can live with them for as long as she wants. This is where it starts to go from purely delusional to full-on problematic because I’m pretty sure an adult who transported a minor across state lines without parental consent could be charged with a crime – harboring a runaway, if not kidnapping. But Brian gets around this by encouraging Katelyn to report her mother’s child abuse to the police. He then files for and is later granted legal guardianship of her until she turns eighteen.

While Katelyn is happily living with the Littrells, Brian breaks up with his fiancee, Leighanne, after finding out that she’s been cheating on him with a man named Pierce, whom she met in England. I prefaced this scene in Chapter 24 with an author’s note that reads, “Just warning everyone, I make Leighanne act like a total bitch in this part. In real life, I respect her and know she would never act this way, but I just had to have her be this way for the plot of the story.” I will amend this author’s note by adding that, while I don’t doubt her love for Brian and the lavish lifestyle his money has provided for her, I no longer respect Leighanne and could absolutely see her acting like the “total bitch” I portrayed her as twenty-five years ago.

This is where the story gets really problematic. A mere four hours after Leighanne leaves, Katelyn invites Brian to watch her favorite movie, Titanic, with her to take his mind off of the break-up. (Hey, that’s funny – Titanic is my favorite movie, too!) While crying together on the couch at the end of the movie, Brian takes Katelyn in his arms and kisses her. And, rather than reminding Brian that she’s underage and he’s her legal guardian, Katelyn eagerly kisses him back. Here is an excerpt from the conversation between them that follows:

“Katelyn, I think we have something going here. If we both are feeling the same way, I think we should hook up. If that’s what you want,” he added quickly.

“I’d love to, Brian,” Katelyn said, her eyes sparkling.

“But, listen, I’d rather no one know about this for awhile. Not until this whole wedding thing has ended,” Brian said. “Then we can tell people.”

As a fifteen-year-old who would have happily “hooked up” with twenty-five-year-old Brian Littrell if she’d had the chance, I apparently didn’t see anything wrong with this scene, but reading it twenty-five years later as an adult and mandated reporter makes me cringe. Brian’s giving off major groomer/pedophile vibes here. Red flags galore!

In spite of their age difference and the fact that they are legally family, Brian and Katelyn continue their secret relationship as she starts her senior year of high school at Tates Creek High School, and he goes back on tour without her, totally neglecting his responsibilities as her guardian. During a break from the tour, Brian asks Katelyn to officially be his girlfriend, and she says yes. Then they decide to tell his parents that they are dating, despite the fact that she has yet to turn eighteen. Rather than reporting their son to the proper authorities for having inappropriate relations with his underage foster daughter, Jackie and Harold react with joy at this announcement and congratulate the happy couple. Out of respect for my Kentuckian readers, I will refrain from making a Kentucky joke here.

Eventually, Katelyn turns eighteen and graduates from high school, and Brian invites her to leave his parents’ house and move in with him. Despite suggesting that they “hook up” months earlier, Brian has Katelyn sleep in his guest room because he “doesn’t feel comfortable sleeping with her yet.” (Apparently, fifteen-year-old me wasn’t clear on what “hooking up” actually means.) But this arrangement doesn’t last long. The following conversation takes place in the very next chapter:

Brian smiled. “I love you like that too, Kate. I want to prove my love for you.”

“How do you want to do that?” she asked.

“I want to have sex with you,” he said shyly.

Katelyn’s eyes widened. “I thought you didn’t believe I sex before marriage,” she said.

Brian grinned widely. “I don’t,” he replied.

Katelyn was confused. “Then,” she started, but he put his finger to her lips to silence her. She watched at he lifted up a large candlestick. Underneath it was a small, black velvet box. He grabbed it and set the candle back down. He took her hand in his.

“Katelyn Mitchell, will you marry me?” he asked, popping open the box.

Katelyn gasped when she saw a huge ring. The stone in it was blue, like a sapphire. “Yes!” she cried. Brian leaned over and kissed her. After the kiss, she took the box from him and pulled out the ring. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, putting it on the ring finger of her left hand. It was a perfect fit. “Is it a sapphire?” she asked.

Brian shook his head. “It’s a rare diamond,” he said, “like the Heart of the Ocean.”

Yup, another Titanic reference! It is Katelyn’s – and my – favorite movie, after all. The chapter ends with another gem:

“Well, now that we’re engaged, I think we can surely start sleeping in the waterbed together. Just sleeping, no sex, I mean,” Brian said. Katelyn grinned.

“Alright!” she said. “Be right back!” She ran down the hall to her bedroom and emerged a few minutes later, dressed in red, satiny negligee.

Brian had put on a pair of boxers. “Wow!” he exclaimed, whistling, when he saw her. “Yeah, baby!” he said in an Austin Powers accent.

Ah, more sweet nineties nostalgia. The Heart of the Ocean! The waterbed! The Austin Powers impression!

After getting engaged and sleeping together in Brian’s waterbed – without, you know, sleeping together – for another year, Brian and Katelyn get married on April 14, 2002 – which also happens to be the ninetieth anniversary of the night the Titanic hit the iceberg. Yay, yet another Titanic reference! So romantic! Surprisingly, Katelyn does not walk down the aisle to the Titanic soundtrack, but guess what song plays during her first dance with Brian? That’s right, “My Heart Will Go On!”

Immediately after their first dance, Brian and Katelyn go outside to get some fresh air, and it is there that Brian is randomly shot by a teenage girl who was apparently jealous of Katelyn for getting to marry him, or so she speculates later. Brian chokes out a few last words before he bleeds out, stops breathing, and dies. The story ends with an epilogue that takes place eighty years later as Katelyn, now one hundred years old, dies in her sleep and is reunited with Brian in a cheesy rip-off of the last scene in Titanic.

“Brian,” Katelyn cried. He grinned widely and wrapped his arms around her. He lowered his lips to hers and kissed her, a kiss that proved his love for her was eternal. He would be the one for her for all eternity.

I think this is the reason I randomly killed Brian off with zero foreshadowing: so I could write a tragically cheesy, Titanic-esque ending. Bonus points for working the story title into its last line!

Despite being terribly problematic in more ways than one, The One is a perfect reflection of the dorky, prudish, naive, Titanic-obsessed, fifteen-year-old fangirl who wrote it, and for that, it takes the number three spot on my list. If you’d like to read a better-written, less-problematic story in which Brian rescues a damsel in distress, whom he later falls in love with, try Song for the Undead – although, technically, the damsel rescues him first in that one. Also, it has zombies!

 

2. Guilty Roads

For the last two entries on this list, we’re moving from fics written during the Millennium era to fics that take place during the Millennium era. Coming in at number two is Guilty Roads, a story I started writing in 2010 and still haven’t finished. The idea for Guilty Roads goes back even further; I originally came up with it in 2003. One of my Wayback Wednesday blogs from 2020 explains how I got the idea, so I won’t go into all that again here. But the basic premise is that, while in Philadelphia for the Into the Millennium tour in 1999, Nick sneaks out of his hotel room to explore the city alone and witnesses a body being dumped in the river by a group of gangsters. The following night, they track Nick down and attack him and Kevin in their hotel room, shooting Kevin in the head and knocking Nick unconscious. Nick comes to in the back of their car as they drive him out into the country to do away with him. He plays dead while they wrap up his body and dump him in the water, where he manages to free himself and swim to the surface. He drags himself to shore before he passes out. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a farmhouse, where an Amish girl named Analiese brought him after finding him lying unconscious on the side of the road. Afraid to return to Philadelphia, where he believes Kevin was killed and his own life would be in danger, Nick spends the next few weeks hiding out with Analiese’s Amish family, who reluctantly offer him sanctuary. But, unbeknownst to Nick, Kevin is not actually dead but comatose as a result of the traumatic brain injury he sustained during the shooting. Meanwhile, Nick is missing and believed to be dead. As the other Boys cling to the hope that he is still alive, Nick begins to acclimate to the Amish lifestyle – and that’s about as far as I got.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to Guilty Roads. I ranked it higher than the previous three fics because the quality of writing is far better, even though the story isn’t finished. While the premise is interesting, the plot itself is convoluted and full of holes, which is part of the reason I’ve never finished writing it. But I’ve never officially discontinued it either because it does have a lot of potential. I honestly really like the sixteen chapters I completed and posted online – seventeen, if you count the joke ending I wrote for April Fool’s Day in 2017 – but I hit a wall with this story and haven’t worked on it in many years. I do have an outline for the rest of it, so even if the wave of inspiration I’ve been waiting for never comes, I could potentially still finish it someday the same way I finished Secrets of the Heart: by forcing myself to do so. But that will have to wait for a time when I’m between stories and have nothing else I’d rather write, so… don’t hold your breath. Instead, I would recommend reading A Heart That Isn’t Mine (if you’re looking for a bromantic, Nick-centered story that includes both missing Backstreet Boys and Backstreet Boys in comas) or Song for the Undead (if you’re intrigued by the idea of Nick and the other guys living without electricity or other modern conveniences.)  They both have plenty of suspense and, even better, they’re both complete!

 

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Backstreet Boy

My favorite of my Millennium-era fanfics is my ill-fated, unfinished crossover, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Backstreet Boy. While I’ve never really gotten into reading or writing fanfic for any other fandom, I went through a brief crossover phase in the early 2010s, when I realized that crossovers could be a way for me to dip my toe into the waters of writing for another fandom while still focusing on the “characters” I’m comfortable writing. I started two different crossovers during this phase: an ER crossover, which became Heroic Measures, and this Harry Potter crossover. They were both originally just side projects that I worked on for fun while I was between novels – and, frankly, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Backstreet Boy should have stayed that way until it was further along. But I got on a roll with writing it in the spring of 2012 and felt good enough about it to go ahead and post it.

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Backstreet Boy, two worlds collide as Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny attend a Backstreet Boys concert in London during the Into the Millennium tour. The story takes place in June 1999, about a year after the Battle of Hogwarts in the last Harry Potter book. Harry and Ron have been working for the Ministry of Magic as Aurors while Hermione and Ginny finish their last year of school at Hogwarts. While Voldemort has been defeated, some of his followers, the Death Eaters, remain at large. After an increase in reports of Muggle-baiting and intelligence that suggests anti-Muggle extremists might target Muggles at the BSB concert, Harry is sent there uncover to keep watch and intervene if anything should occur. Sure enough, during “Quit Playing Games,” as the Boys fly over the crowd, they are attacked by Death Eaters. Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny manage to fight off the Death Eaters and save the Boys with the help of AJ, who reveals his own magical ability. Afterwards, the two groups team up to investigate the incident… and that’s where the story stops, for the time being.

Truth be told, I never should have posted this story when I did. I should have waited until I was further into it and working on it consistently, which is what I do now with new stories. I hate leaving projects unfinished, but a lot of things got in the way of me finishing this one: first Secrets of the Heart, then Sick as My Secrets, then my master’s program, and, finally, the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The latter kinda killed any motivation I had left to keep writing this crossover, which is a shame because I really do like the first eight chapters, enough to rank them higher than the finished fics I wrote twenty-five years ago and even Guilty Roads. I like how it begins like a Harry Potter parody starring the Backstreet Boys before diverging into its own unique plot. I like how I emulate J.K. Rowling’s style when writing about her characters. I like the interaction between those characters and the Boys. And, of course, I like the throwback to the Into the Millennium tour.

Hopefully I will get a fresh wave of inspiration some day and go back to writing this story because, like Guilty Roads, I think it has a lot of potential. But, in the meantime, if you’re looking for an action-packed adventure with heroes, villains, humor, and plenty of pop culture references, check out The Pandaskunk Saga or 00Carter! The former is a trilogy of finished novellas. The latter is not finished, but it’s a lot further along than HPatHBBSB – and, as an episodic story, 00Carter is unlikely to ever truly come to an end, anyway.

 

The Millennium era is one of my favorite BSB eras as both a fan and a fanfic reader/writer. It was so much fun to see BSB at the peak of their career, in terms of popularity, and the amount of fanfic that came from this era will never be topped. Maybe someday I’ll write another story (or finish an existing one) set in this era. What is your favorite BSB era? Leave a comment below and let me know!