2025 Fanworks Year in Review

Written for the Fan in the Mirror challenge for Voiceteam Mystery Box 2025.

Podfics

Here are my stats for the year! (Don’t mind slight number discrepancies we are working on it)



This was a bit of a weird year for me in podfics, I feel like I was very inconsistent with podficcing. Between some personal stuff at the beginning of the year and being all-consumed by podfic-related coding instead of actual projects, I spent a lot of time not directly working on podfic.

I did get to go to an in-person podfic meetup for the first time this year, and it was one of the highlights of my year. It was so fun to hang out with other podficcers and record just so much stuff together. I may have caught the recording live bug, it was a very different experience for me and really cool to be able to bounce off the other people recording with me.

I have been continuing my mission to podfic every decent Only Friends fic about Boston I can get permission for, which I find very personally rewarding, but my Only Friends pods usually get very little attention (even from podfic standards). To be fair, I am the only person making Only Friends podfics, so it’s not exactly a hopping podfic fandom. I’ve already gotten through most of them, so there were only 3 this year, as opposed to 2024’s whopping 41.

I’ve been starting a lot of longer projects again. I really do prefer the rhythm of steadily working on a longer project rather than doing a lot of small projects. I started posting The Rightish Reasons, which has long been a favorite and is fun to work on. I’ve also been chomping at the bit to start podding Ever Seaward Echoes More, which I was reading at the end of last year/beginning of this year, got permission for in June, and have since been off-and-on working on a new feature for my database to allow me to reasonably split up its very long chapters. I’m finally starting on actually recording right around the new year, and it’s very exciting. It’s a very emotional fic, and I’ve already had to start stocking tissues in my recording closet.

Another interesting thing is that I’ve been embracing making podfics I can never post publicly a little more. There’s some fics that I’m not really interested in asking permission for or publicly having a podfic for, but I would enjoy narrating or having a recording of just for myself. I still prefer to work on projects that I can post, but I feel like it’s helpful to recenter me in loving podficcing for itself to make things that I’m not going to share widely or at all.

I could write more about specific projects, and may add more thoughts later, but the Voiceteam clock is ticking.

Coding

Podfic database

First full year with my podfic database!! My beloved project that I started working on in around October 2024. A lot of my fannish energy was taken up with coding and managing podfic database stuff, which is delightful but also Not Podfic lol

Other

I wrote a lot of AO3 userscripts this year, which is always fun. I’m particularly pleased with my bookmark presets script; it needs a good amount of refining still, but it’s really personally useful to me to automatically prepopulate tags. (I’ve started putting a bookmark tag on fics with a kpop group being in one big poly relationship, because no one knows how to tag this consistently and I like it very much and want to be able to search for it.)

I felt like I did a lot of making/updating userscripts based on requests from others, and it has been a consistent joy and delight to be able to make things that serve other people. It’s so fun to see someone state a problem and be able to tell them “give me two days” and then provide them a helpful solution!

Writing

This was a surprisingly good year for my writing endeavors? I didn’t post much, but I actually had more than one fic idea this year and am working on several projects! I also am collecting quite the list of prompts and ideas (90% omegaverse, which should not be as surprising to me as it is) that I may or may not flesh out a little more at some point. I have about four major ideas I’m writing right now, with a few other small pieces I’m playing around with. It’s been really fun to get back into writing a little more, I’ve had very inconsistent amounts of energy for it for years now.

Goals for next year

• Be more consistent with updating! I have so many WIPs that I really just update whenever the mood strikes me, and I would love to be more reliable about that
• Continue improving my podfic database - I especially want more stats and I want to make the sections feature a lot more robust
  
  • A new feature that’s probably coming up soon is bingo card support
• Post more writing - there’s one fic I’ve been working on for at least a year, and a few others that are taking solid shape and I don’t want to delay on too long