Fic Talk > General Discussion
Writing & Thread (aka The Writing Thread 4)
RokofAges75:
--- Quote from: nicksgal on July 09, 2021, 04:50:55 PM ---I don't think I'm googling the right thing... Anyone know off hand which of the Boys were still living in Florida circa Millennium? Mostly Kevin's living arrangements at the time. It's honestly just a "what Kevin was doing prior to this scene" type throw away line and I thought "on a date with Kristin" might be good whereabouts.
Edited to Add: Nevermind, I finally found an old article referencing Kevin and Brian's engagements that said that Kevin was still living in Florida, but Kristin was living in LA around that time. Think she would have happened to pop by Florida to hang out before the Boys officially left on tour? lol
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Glad you found what you were looking for! All I know is that Kevin and Kristin bought a house in L.A. in March 2001. https://variety.com/2009/dirt/real-estalker/backstreet-boy-kevin-richardson-moving-on-1201229329/ This is the house I made the terrible blueprint for for my story LOL.
All my stories set that far back in time have taken place when they were on tour, so I've never really researched where they were all living then. I know Brian and Leighanne bought their current house in 2000 before they got married, but I'm not sure where they lived before that. AJ bought a house in L.A. in August 2001 (https://variety.com/2011/dirt/real-estalker/backstreet-boy-a-j-mclean-wants-to-move-1201231580/), so he may still have been living in Florida before that. I'm assuming Howie and Nick also still lived in Florida then.
In summary, I think you can realistically write them all living in Florida in your story, just not in the same house by the beach in Orlando. ;)
nicksgal:
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on July 10, 2021, 10:25:50 PM ---Yay for 1000 words and a title! That is huge! And yes, anticipating the readers' reaction can be a great motivator. Can't wait till you're far enough to start posting!
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It's definitely getting somewhere, just slowly lurching along. It helps that the chapters feel more like 2500 word ones than 3000 word ones. So all in all, it'll only be about 40,000 words or so. If I can pick up some steam on it, I can be done with that near the end of August, hopefully. Yeah, unless y'all don't find it nearly as funny as I do. Then you'll be like "why did Dee write this weird story that isn't funny at all?" lol I hope you do enjoy it. I've been listening to the Boys all evening while shredding papers, so I'm hoping it puts me in a more BSB writing mood than chores.
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on July 10, 2021, 10:25:50 PM ---Yep, I definitely deleted that line when I went back to it last night LOL. I finally made it up to my writing room and got over 100 words written in a sitting for the first time in a week, which is... something. I did not stay up there and write for long, though. I dunno; I just wasn't feeling it. I haven't had caffeine in like three days, so that could be part of my problem. After another lazy day, I am drinking coffee at 10 p.m. in hopes it will fuel me to either have a productive writing night or go paint my bathroom LOL.
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I figured you would. I always have too. I had kind of a blah writing day today too. I ended up doing some chores around my house, reading a few more chapters in "Solutions and Other Problems" after like three months, and watching a few BBT episodes. I kept popping back to writing ever few hours or so, but only got a few dozen words here and there. No caffeine?! Oh dear. I had so much caffeine yesterday and then drank all evening. That could be part of my blahs, lol. Today I had a regular amount of caffeine, but felt very lazy all day. I hope your 10pm coffee gives you the energy to do something productive! We have a clear idea of how your neighbors would feel about night lawn mowing. How would they feel about night painting? lol
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on July 10, 2021, 10:25:50 PM ---I also started Schitt's Creek a few years ago and only watched the first episode. I thought it was okay, but not great enough to keep going. Well, my mom is obsessed with it now, so she convinced me to give it another try. It's definitely one of those shows that gets better after a couple of episodes, when you get to know the characters. It's not usually laugh out loud funny, but it is entertaining. I'm not really a sitcom person; I binge-watched all of The Office a few years ago and loved that one, but that's probably the only one I've seen every episode of, besides South Park if that counts.
I've been on more of a documentary kick this weekend. I watched two documentaries about the Olympics/gymnastics - "Golden" and "The 96 Effect" on Peacock - and am working my way through "This is Pop" on Netflix. Brian is interviewed in the Stockholm Syndrome episode about Swedish songwriters.
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Good to know. I mentioned it yesterday when we started talking about shows worth bingeing and was told it's great, so maybe I'll have to give it a rewatch if you had the same initial opinion that I did. I'm surprised I didn't like it because everyone keeps telling me it's good and I do like sitcoms.
Ooh, fun! I've been meaning to watch "This is Pop." Hubs and I were watching the "Dark Side of Football" the other day and apparently the same channel is starting "Dark Side of the 90s" and I am intrigued. But I said that to the hubs and he said "It's probably Kurt Cobain and stuff like that." He seemed skeptical when I said being in a boyband wasn't all sunshine and rainbows either (for the actual boybands, I had a great time in boyband land in the 90s). Lance made that Boyband Con film, I bet he'd go on and talk about ponzi schemes.
nicksgal:
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on July 10, 2021, 10:44:57 PM ---I know, it sucks. I guess it's my fault for not logging into my old Yahoo account more often, but damn. I wish I had copied and pasted them all into a Word document or something because I would still have that saved. I wish there was a way to mass-save reviews from AC in case the site goes down permanently someday. That's a lot of copy-pasting to do LOL.
I had not looked at the main site this week until you said that, but wow, how weird to see Lenni post a story out of nowhere! That has happened over the years; old regulars will pop on and say hi or update something, then disappear again. I'm glad you stuck around!
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Right? I'm thinking of all the old emails I had that I would have loved to keep if I had known the internet wasn't forever. Not review related, but I probably emailed myself the early version of PBox at one point too -- I wish I knew what the first eight chapters were originally like back in 2005. I wouldn't have any of that saved now though, since it would have been on my various laptops that died. Oh well. Saving your AC reviews sounds like your next fanfic adjacent project when you're done posting SAMS on AO3, lol.
I like to check on Wednesday when I update, just to see what everyone else is doing. Or if anyone else is doing something besides you and Tracy, but only because I know when you both update because you say so. I wonder why it's pops and not sticks. But of course! My point in saying hi was to catch back up. :)
For Lenni specifically, I wondered if she had an AO3 account. There's a lot of turtle love over there that I think would appreciate her stories too (I looked it up). Lenni, if you're lurking and you're not on AO3, you should be. You can log on and confirm or deny. :)
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on July 10, 2021, 10:44:57 PM ---Aww, I wish you had come back in 2011 and cruised with us! But maybe that wasn't enough time away for you to miss fanfic enough to stage a successful comeback like you did last year. I do believe everything happens for a reason. And I hope there will be more cruises in the future! My bank account and credit card are happy they've had plenty of time to recover since the last one I went on, though.
I feel the same way about that question. I don't think I would go back and do anything differently because everything I've done up to this point has made me the writer and person I am today. Maybe I would go back and tell myself not to post some of the stories that still sit unfinished, but even that was a valuable learning experience that taught me to hoard chapters and not post until I'm reasonably sure I can finish the story. Maybe I would think longer and harder about the name of my site if I knew it was going to be around 21+ years later. I don't necessarily dislike the name Dreamer's Sanctuary, but sometimes I wish I'd come up with something a little more clever or Backstreet-related. Fun fact: I strongly considered changing the name to "Sadness is Beautiful" sometime around 2001, but ultimately decided it would be too much work to rebrand everything and change URLs. I'm glad I stuck with the original name just for continuity's sake.
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I will be honest. I did not set myself to "hidden" to lurk while logged in and someone came on and looked at my profile and I chickened out, lol. It might have been Rose if memory serves me correctly. I was also still not writing fanfic at the time, so I doubt my comeback would have been successful. But maybe being here would have made me want to write again too, so who knows! :shrug: I hear there's another potential Vegas residency and roulette in a casino is almost the same as roulette on a boat, lol. The pools are closed (or very limited) in December though, I think. And yes, cruises are expensive! But worth it.
Exactly. I agree, it's even worth it to make a mistake. None of us can be sure anything we do will have good or bad outcomes until we do them. That's interesting that you thought about changing the name, but you're totally right, rebranding is a headache! What made you pick Dreamer's Sanctuary to start?
nicksgal:
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on July 10, 2021, 10:56:38 PM ---Glad you found what you were looking for! All I know is that Kevin and Kristin bought a house in L.A. in March 2001. https://variety.com/2009/dirt/real-estalker/backstreet-boy-kevin-richardson-moving-on-1201229329/ This is the house I made the terrible blueprint for for my story LOL.
All my stories set that far back in time have taken place when they were on tour, so I've never really researched where they were all living then. I know Brian and Leighanne bought their current house in 2000 before they got married, but I'm not sure where they lived before that. AJ bought a house in L.A. in August 2001 (https://variety.com/2011/dirt/real-estalker/backstreet-boy-a-j-mclean-wants-to-move-1201231580/), so he may still have been living in Florida before that. I'm assuming Howie and Nick also still lived in Florida then.
In summary, I think you can realistically write them all living in Florida in your story, just not in the same house by the beach in Orlando. ;)
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This is now the second time you've talked about this terrible blue print. I want to see it so much, lol.
For once, I have an answer to Brian and Leighanne! (I think.) That same article said Brian proposed at "their home in Atlanta," so I'm guessing they had some other home in Atlanta prior to their current home if they didn't buy that one until 2000. (https://people.com/archive/goin-to-the-chapel-vol-53-no-9/)
LMAO! They are all staying in the same hotel suite in the story, which is almost like living in a beach house in Orlando together except more likely to be accurate (especially without the beach), and more so if Brian was living in Atlanta at the time and couldn't just be at home during tour rehearsals.
Also, once again, I am amazed at y'all keeping track of timelines, because this is literally the timeline I'm trying to keep track of and it is exhausting:
A tiny BSB timeline:
* April 12, 1999 -- IWITW released
* May 11, 1999 -- filmed Disney Channel concert special in New York City
* May 18, 1999 -- Millennium released
* June 2, 1999 -- Into the Millennium tour kicks off in Ghent, Belgium
RokofAges75:
--- Quote from: nicksgal on July 10, 2021, 12:07:05 PM ---It did feel nice, although I think there's a glitch because it still says that I finished posting it in 2021 even though I changed it, so who knows! I would be very sad if I truly had started PBox in 2005 and finished it in 2021, lol. The series, fine. The one book, eek, lol. So far, no increased readership; will continue to provide updates.
I was able to push through it yesterday, but not the first time it happened this week. It was just a line with a lot of alliteration, so it felt almost lyrical. I would have shared it because I enjoyed it that much, but it would have been spoilery. You're right, we've just got to keep on stringing words and sentences together! I'm glad I'm not the only one that happens to; I wonder why our brains do that.
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You probably missed a chapter. The same thing happened to me, and that's what it was. I had to go back and check chapters until I found the one I had apparently skipped over, and that fixed it.
LOL That will be 00Carter, except we'll probably never actually finish it. 2007-???
I adore alliteration!! Probably too much - sometimes I overuse it to the point of sounding cheesy, but I love that lyrical flow.
--- Quote from: nicksgal on July 10, 2021, 12:07:05 PM ---I feel like a lot of new writers get bogged down by the "right" way to do things. And browsing r/writing or r/fanfic has only made me feel more that way. And I think that's disheartening that people are so paralyzed by the thought of doing something "wrong" in a creative medium that they're afraid to try.
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Yes, that makes me sad, too. I also cringe every time I see someone talk about the lessons they learned in school, like "show not tell" or "said is dead," confusing them or leading to overwriting/purple prose. Personally, I don't remember ever really being taught how to write fiction in school. The focus was on persuasive and expository writing, and the instruction was very formulaic. We responded to writing prompts, and we used graphic organizers like the hamburger or the house, and we wrote five-paragraph essays. It wasn't until high school that a teacher finally told us, "You know, an essay can be longer than five paragraphs." Mind blown. LOL So I get how kids/newbies can be so rigid in their thinking that they assume the way they were taught is the only way to do it. Maybe it's a good thing, then, that I was never explicitly taught how to write fiction and learned it on my own by reading and emulating what other writers did.
I do teach fiction writing, and while I definitely teach "show don't tell" and have taught lessons on varying word choice instead of overusing certain words (more so words like "good" and "bad" than "said"), I try to show my students that there are multiple ways to do it. I write in front of them to model what I'm teaching, but we also study mentor texts to see different ways published authors write. They have a lot more freedom as far as what they write about and how they write it. Some of them still tell far more than show, while others over-show by including every mundane detail, but I'm always impressed by how creative they are and how well some of them write. Hopefully I've helped spark that creativity and not stifled. I wonder if any of them have discovered fanfic over the years. That would be cool!
--- Quote from: nicksgal on July 10, 2021, 12:07:05 PM ---And I get wanting to help people avoid the pain of rejection for something simple like "use strong verbs instead of weak verbs paired with adverbs," but I also think that if anyone's seriously pursuing publishing that they would find people to read their drafts before sending them out to agents or publishers. And those beta readers would say "have you considered 'sprinted' instead of 'quickly ran'?" or whatever. And fanfic, even more so, I can't imagine anyone's going to pop into a review unprompted to talk about the use of adverbs or plot holes or whatever unless it was a clarity/format issue that made it hard to read/understand.
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Yeah, beta readers are good for that. That seems like a good first step for anyone seriously considering publishing. Because you're right, most reviewers aren't going to point out something like that. It seems too nitpicky. I would only give that kind of feedback if asked to beta read.
--- Quote from: nicksgal on July 10, 2021, 12:07:05 PM ---I can't remember if we talked about this back when we discussed "breakout" stories or not, but do you remember actively thinking "Oh, x is a "writing rule" I am breaking, what can I do to make my story better?" Or "I feel like I'm not doing x well enough, what can I do to fix that?" Anyone else can answer too, as always.
I know I had a PDF I'd lovingly saved to a floppy disk at my mom's work so I could bring it home to my internet-less computer because it talked about story structure and character arcs, but had a section specifically focused on villains. And this would have been when I was working on that 2003 OF because I think I some point I realized the villain was just evil for the sake of being evil and it was kind of boring. So I went on this whole research project to figure out what I was "doing wrong" with my boring villain (who shouldn't have been boring, they were a literal god and awesome in theory). Anyway, long story short, the answer was something to the effect of "because they're evil isn't a good motivation for a villain to do the things they do, so they should have a reason just like the heroes have a reason, which probably isn't 'because they're good'." Anyway, the point of this story related to BSB fanfic was that I got it figured out for that story and took it to heart when I was crafting Justin and Renee in PBox, and I like to think they're better for it. But I wouldn't have gotten to that point without reading other villains that were good and writing a bunch of BSB fanfics where the "villains" ("rivals" is probably a better term) were ho hum.
I realize this particular example isn't directly applicable to many BSB fanfics, it's not like cancer has a tragic backstory where it was shunned by the regular cells for being a little different, so it decided to make other cells like it and destroy the world. (Or maybe that is the backstory for every cancer cell, lol.)
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That is a good question and a good example with the villain thing. I can actually relate to that. I used to write more suspense stories in my early days of fanfic because that is one of my favorite genres. But I wasn't good at it. My villains were too cliched - mostly evil NSYNC members out for revenge or evil, gold-digging girlfriends - and my plots were too predictable. I tried writing a mystery once, and my readers figured out who the real killer was early on in the story, so I tried the Scream trick of adding a second villain, but then the second villain's motive didn't really make sense - not that the original villain's motive was great to begin with. It was a mess. I also wrote the Scooby Doo-style villain monologues where they explain how and why they did what they did. ("And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling Backstreet Boys!") The best suspense story I wrote in the pre-Broken era was inspired by a Lifetime Original Movie, which says a lot LOL.
At some point I realized I sucked at writing suspense and villains and shied away from that type of story for years. I did enjoy writing Dr. Rough in 00Carter, but he is such a parody that he doesn't really count as a serious villain. I finally gave suspense another try with Guilty Roads, and we all know how well that went. But the next time I tried tackling that kind of story, I put a lot more effort into developing the villains as well-rounded characters rather than cliched caricatures. I worked on the characters first, before plotting the full story. I did a ton of research into why real people like them do what they do and wrote detailed back stories for them to make their motives believable. Like other psychopaths, they were charismatic and even likeable characters before their callous nature came out, rather than pure evil. And no one fully predicted where the story was going, although points to Tracy for being suspicious about one of the villains early on. I still was able to pull off a twist and get the reader reaction I was hoping for, instead of having people figure out everything in advance. So that experience gave me back some confidence when it comes to writing suspense and villains. With the right idea, I would write another one.
But I still prefer cancer as a villain. Poor little cancer cells, shunned by the regular ones for being mutants. Of course they want to take over the world! They're just like Dr. Rough! LOL
Going back to your original question, I do remember actively thinking before I started Broken, "If I'm going to write another cancer story, I have to write it well. I have to research and write it realistically and try to make it at least as good as Swollen Issues II." I knew my writing wasn't as good as some of the stories I read, and I think it was the challenge of trying to live up to Swollen Issues II, the story that inspired Broken, that forced me to up my game and strive for greatness. Once I got into my groove on that one, my writing just got better and better. I'm sure part of that was just maturity and the natural progression of my writing up to that point, but I really did try to step it up with my descriptions and characters' emotions and of course the medical research. Swollen Issues II is far from the best written piece of fanfic of all time, but it packs an emotional punch and gets the medical stuff right. Those were the two things I was going for above all, and I think I succeeded the most I could at that point in my life.
2008 was a big year for me learning how to write a setting. I think setting sometimes gets neglected in fanfic, at least in our fandom, because we use a lot of the same basic settings - cities like LA or Orlando, Backstreet Boys' houses, tour buses, concert venues, hospitals, etc. I wrote a lot of AU in 2008, between 00Carter, Secrets of the Heart, and Song for the Undead, and that is how I learned to develop more detailed settings. I remember putting a lot of effort into researching the geography of Antarctica to write the opening scene of the Ice Ice Baby episode of 00Carter. I also read a lot of Stephen King that year and remember being inspired by 'Salem's Lot as I described the settings in Secrets of the Heart. Granted, setting plays a more important role in 'Salem's Lot than it did in my story, but at least it got me to put more thought into my settings than I had previously. I do a lot more Google-mapping while writing these days than I ever did before then.
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