Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating it today! As always, I am thankful for you, my readers, who continue to visit this site and what I write.
As we approach the end of November, the year is starting to wind down, and so is my series of Throwback Thursday blogs. There are only two more left after this one! But I’ve been saving some of the best for last.
In television, November is known as one of the “sweeps” periods of the year, when TV ratings are measured. Networks tend to air their most exciting, dramatic episodes, the kind with cliffhangers, big reveals, and important plot developments, to attract more viewers during these months. To coincide with November sweeps, I’m counting down my favorite pivotal moments from my fanfics, the turning points that changed the entire trajectory of a story. These are among my most memorable chapters, and just as I was excited to post them in the first place, I’ve been looking forward to blogging about them.
5. The Rocket Launch
When I started writing Sick as My Secrets, the follow-up to my first foray into slash, I honestly wasn’t sure whether its two main characters, Howie and Nick, would end up together or not. I wanted them to become a couple in the story, but I didn’t want to force a romantic or sexual relationship against either character’s will. While a writer can ultimately force her characters to do anything, I’ve seen firsthand how making them act uncharacteristically just to further the plot can ruin both the characters and the story. I didn’t want to make that same mistake with SAMS. If Nick and Howie were going to become a couple, it had to be believable.
It was clear to me that Howie’s character had feelings for Nick that went beyond friendship and brotherhood, but I had a harder time figuring out how Nick’s character really felt about Howie. But, by the second half of the story, the hidden thoughts and feelings Nick had buried in the depths of his brain had finally begun to surface. I knew he just needed a little push to bring them to light.
That push comes from Howie in Chapter 50, when he dares Nick to kiss him. This pivotal moment takes place as the pair are watching a rocket launch in Cape Canaveral. Knowing how much Nick loves space – and that Howie lives on the Space Coast – I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to get the two of them to talk, open up about their feelings, and possibly take things further. This chapter is an important one because it’s the first time Nick admits to Howie that he did feel something the night they got drunk and hooked up on the cruise, which is the catalyst for the whole story. When he tries to backpedal on this admission, Howie calls him out, daring Nick to kiss him, right then and there, and then try to say he feels nothing. Never one to turn down a dare, Nick does it, and sparks fly. From that moment on, he and Howie are no longer just friends. This is when “Nowie” is officially launched.
4. Moose in Headlights
The Road to Bethlehem starts off as a cute story about the five Backstreet Boys quarantining together in an isolated cabin in the White Mountains near Bethlehem, New Hampshire to work on the Christmas album during Covid. But it soon becomes a survival story, as a series of unfortunate events leaves them stranded in a life-threatening situation.
It all starts in Chapter 5, when AJ wakes up in the middle of a stormy night with excruciating abdominal pain, which Brian and Kevin suspect is appendicitis. After some debate, AJ agrees to let Brian drive him to the ER. But, on the way there, a moose steps into their path, causing Brian to swerve and crash their SUV off the side of the remote mountain road. Without cell service, they are stranded – and, between AJ’s illness and Brian’s injuries, neither one of them is in any kind of condition to climb back up to the road and walk to find help. This triggers a chain of events that will ultimately land four out of the five Boys in the hospital and leave the group forever changed. But it all begins with a moose on the road… to Bethlehem.
3. Drastic Measures
Savvy readers may have seen the writing on the wall when Nick was first diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a form of bone cancer, after fracturing his tibia near the beginning of Broken. But at the end of Chapter 99, after undergoing both chemotherapy and radiation, Nick is blindsided by the news that his cancer has spread, leaving him with only one, last-resort treatment option: the amputation of his left leg. After a few chapters spent grappling with the life-altering decision he must make, he ultimately undergoes the amputation in Chapter 106 and wakes up in the next chapter a changed man.
When I wrote these chapters, I was eighteen years old and undergoing a pretty big life change myself. Having just graduated high school, I was getting ready to go away to college. In fact, Chapter 100 is the last chapter I finished and posted before moving into my dorm, knowing full well that once I got settled, I would face the daunting task of writing this whole amputation arc – without my new roommate finding out, I might add. As much as I loved college, I don’t miss those days of having to hide my fanfic hobby from my roommates. Of course, my problems were nothing compared to poor Broken Nick’s, but I clearly poured all of my own teenage anxieties and insecurities into his character as he faced a similar fear of the unknown.
From a writer’s standpoint, I was almost as nervous about making the decision to amputate my main character’s leg as he was. Up until this point, I had done minimal research for my fanfics, relying mostly on outdated Lurlene McDaniel books and Encarta 95 on CD-rom for medical information. These were the days of dial-up internet, when looking stuff up online wasn’t anywhere near as fast or easy as it is now. But, as I had no idea what I was doing when it came to writing about the post-amputation recovery and rehabilitation process – and I wanted to do it well – I knew I would need to majorly step up my research game in order to pull it off. That was one reason why I was so anxious about it. The other reason was that, although I had killed Backstreet Boys in previous fics, I had never permanently maimed one before. It’s moments like these that make writing fanfic about real people awkward. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me now, in light of some of the stories I’ve written since, but at that time, chopping off Nick’s leg felt extreme, just as it did for him in the story. I knew that once it was done, there was no going back, and, just like my character, I would have to live with the consequences of that decision.
Thus, the amputation arc in Part 3 of Broken marked not only a pivotal moment for Nick as a character but for me as a writer. But I feel confident in saying that we both made the right decision. Nick survived and went on to find love and live a long life, while I learned how to research and became a better writer for it. While it doesn’t match my current writing style, this is the best part of Broken, and it made me into the writer I am today. No regrets!
2. The Dead Rise
When we first started writing Song for the Undead in 2008, Rose and I worried that many readers wouldn’t take it seriously or even give it a try if they knew it was about zombies. That was one reason why we originally posted it under the temporary title 4.15.12, which is the date the dead rise in the story, known as The Day of Unholy Resurrection. We always planned to change the title to Song for the Undead after the zombies were first revealed. But the other reason we kept them a secret at first was so that the readers who followed it from the beginning would get to experience the shock of the dead reawakening as zombies right along with our main characters.
The big reveal happens in Chapter 31, which is one of my favorite chapters I’ve ever written. It starts at the stroke of midnight, as Brian startles awake in his dark, quiet house, where his wife and twin daughters died the previous day. Their bodies are still lying in their beds upstairs, as Brian hasn’t been able to get a hold of anyone to come and take them away. No one is answering their phones. The rest of the world seems to have died right along with Brian’s world. Knowing he can’t leave his family to rot, he decides to take care of them himself. So he goes upstairs, grabs his favorite Bible, and heads to his bedroom, intending to hold a makeshift funeral service. He begins by reading from First Corinthians, then launches into the twenty-third Psalm. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”
It’s as he recites these familiar words by heart that Brian hears the mattress creak and opens his eyes to see Leighanne’s cloudy eyes staring back at him. As he reaches out to close them, she suddenly grabs his arm and pulls him toward her gnashing teeth. That’s the moment when this scene – and this story – turns from an apocalyptic drama into a full-on horror fic. Zombie Leighanne gets up from the bed and chases Brian into the bathroom, where he ends up jamming a towel bar through one of her eye sockets, effectively destroying her brain. If that wasn’t enough to break him, he then has to put down both of his daughters, who have also risen from the dead.
It’s an absolutely brutal but powerfully effective way to introduce the element of zombies to the first of our main characters and readers alike, and it’s a scene I’ve always been super proud of. I love the way the suspense builds slowly with a growing sense of dread that suddenly erupts into a fast-paced fight scene. I hadn’t written a lot of horror up to this point, so it was definitely a challenge for me to strike the right balance between description, action, and emotion, but I think I nailed it. There would be many more zombie scenes to follow, but this one – my first one – will always be my favorite.
1. A Gruesome Discovery
The first half of A Heart That Isn’t Mine reads like just another one of my medical dramas – heavy on the drama, with just a hint of romance. But, by Chapter 29, it becomes clear that all is not as it seems, when Howie hurries down to Key West after hearing from Brian that Nick is in the hospital there, only to discover that neither Nick nor Brian are where they’re supposed to be. By the end of the chapter, Howie has reported them both missing and is working with the police to try to find them.
But the biggest, most pivotal moment comes in Chapter 30, when Nick makes a gruesome discovery that turns this medical drama into a horror story. The chapter starts with Nick lying awake late one night in what he believes is the hospital room he’s sharing with Brian, who has been on life support since the car “accident” that landed him in the “hospital.” I’m using quotes here, of course, because the crash was not an accident, and their room is not in a real hospital, as Nick will soon realize when he learns that everything he’s been told leading up to this chapter was a lie. He’s not really dying of heart failure. Brian’s not really brain dead. And the doctors and nurses who have been treating them haven’t really been taking care of them. Instead, they’ve been drugging both Nick and Brian in order to hold them hostage and make them believe they’re too sick or hurt to leave. But Nick doesn’t yet know that when he’s talking to Brian at the beginning of the chapter. He does suspect that Brian can still hear and understand him when he notices Brian’s heart rate reacting to the sound of his voice. After his call button goes unanswered, Nick climbs out of bed and makes his way out of his room and down the hall, trying to find someone who will believe that Brian isn’t dead. Instead, he witnesses one of his “nurses,” Patrick, having sex with a woman’s dead body. As he stumbles backward in shock, Nick trips over his IV stand, which crashes to the floor, alerting Patrick’s twin sister, Elizabeth, who promptly injects Nick with a powerful sedative that renders him unconscious almost immediately, ending the chapter. This moment serves as the catalyst for the rest of the novel, in which Elizabeth’s and Dani’s true colors emerge and their twisted plot is revealed.
Like most of the other chapters on this list, I was super excited to get to this chapter but also incredibly anxious to post it because I’d never written anything quite that dark before. I obviously expected a reaction, but I was worried about what readers would think about my big twist. Thankfully, the ones who left me comments loved it! I’m still very grateful for the good reaction this story got. The reward was worth the risk I took in writing something so depraved.
Thank you to everyone who has read my fics and is reading these words right now. I appreciate you more than you could ever know. I’ll be back in December with my last two Throwback Thursday blog posts, so stay tuned!