Why did you choose the type of cancer you did and did you know from the start that Nick's leg was going to go? Was there ever a time as you were writing this that you thought about killing him?
LOL There was actually a lot of thought that went into that decision. I can still remember sitting on my bed, brainstorming a list of different types of cancer and weighing the pros and cons of each. (Yes, there are "pros" when it comes to giving Backstreet Boys cancer.) I had already written one cancer story where Brian had lymphoma, which is also what Nick had in Swollen Issues, so I knew that one was out. I was inspired by Swollen Issues, but I wanted to be careful not to blatantly copy Swollen Issues. Leukemia is similar, so I quickly crossed that one off the list too. Then I started thinking about different organs and parts of the body, and eventually I thought of bone cancer. Here is a dramatic reenactment of the discussion that happened between the little voices in my head after that:
(There's no devil smiley, so I'm using Batman instead): Ooh, if I gave him bone cancer, I could amputate one of his limbs!
*gasp* You can't do that!
Just joking... maybe.
That's just wrong.
But interesting, right? Not something you see a lot in fanfic.
That's because it's crossing a line, permanently maiming a Backstreet Boy like that!
But it might be fun...
Come on, you couldn't really do that...
It would be a challenge, for sure. But I'm Batman. I love a good challenge.
You are sick.
Heh... so is Nick. I'm a poet, and I know it!
You win.
So the leg choppage idea kind of started off as a joke, but once it was in my head, I couldn't get rid of it, so that was the direction the story was heading from then on. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me now because I've done so much worse since, but at the time, amputating a Backstreet Boy's leg (and it was always a leg, for whatever reason) seemed like the most horrific thing I could do. I had killed Backstreet Boys before, but somehow, permanently disfiguring one and making him live with it seemed worse. There's probably some psychology behind that, maybe me being a teenage girl at the time and overly concerned with my appearance and how others saw me or something, because I look back now and I'm like, "Meh, there are so many worse things that could happen to you than losing a leg." But I was really nervous about doing it and researching it and writing it realistically because I was way out of my element at that point. But then, the challenge of it was also what made it appealing to me.
I don't think I ever seriously considered killing Nick in this one. It probably came up at some point early on in the planning of the story, but I was kind of like, "What's the point?" I knew I was going to torture him so much that it just seemed too cruel to kill him after all of that. I'm all for fictional cruelty to Backstreet Boys, but at the end of the day, I like a happy ending.
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Topic: FS for April: story #99 Broken by RokofAges75 (Read 19238 times)