starfishstar

Remembered just in time that I'd wanted to get this one last 2025 retrospective posted by the end of January. With an hour to spare, here I am! And actually, well, it's a retrospective of a bit more than just 2025...

Fic I posted in...2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025:

Apparently I haven't done one of these year-end summaries of my writing since 2021. ...Whoops. Life has been a lot, these past few years. Well, I'm here now.

2022:

JANUARY: Four, Not One (Scholomance – Naomi Novik; Chocolate Box fic)

FEBRUARY: The Silly Squirrel and the Gerblin (Hamster Princess Series – Ursula Vernon; Purimgifts fic)

AUGUST: A Verb Strong Enough (Harry Potter: Andromeda Tonks)

DECEMBER: This Is a Cheerful Blog About a Small Town and Definitely Not a Romantic Comedy (We Are a Picturesque Small Town And We Refuse To Be The Setting For Your RomCom – McSweeney's; Yuletide fic)

The Stress of Her Regard podfic (The Affair of the Mysterious Letter – Alexis Hall; Holmestice work)

2023:

MARCH: Pago Pago (Cabin Pressure at Purim; Purimgifts fic)

MAY: Tremble Before My Name (Call Me By Your Name)

JUNE: INCREDIBLE THOUGHTS (Sherlock; Holmestice fic)

DECEMBER: Queervengers Assemble (Boyfriend Material – Alexis Hall; Yuletide fic)

A Terribly Normal Thing to Do (The Doomsday Books – K. J. Charles; Yuletide treat)

From the Beginning (A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys; Yuletide treat)

Obscure Richard Pictures (Boyfriend Material – Alexis Hall; Yuletide treat)

Summer Comes Around Again (Fire Island; Yuletide treat)

2024:

APRIL: 500 Words for Elio (Call Me By Your Name)

SEPTEMBER: Shiver at the Beauty (Call Me By Your Name)

NOVEMBER: Was There a Shadow, Was There Nothing (Watson and Holmes comics; Holmestice fic)

Casting Light (Watson and Holmes comics; Holmestice treat)

DECEMBER: Like a River Mare Home at Last (Graceling Realm Series – Kristin Cashore; Yuletide fic)

Doesn't Speak the Language, Holds No Currency (You Can Call Me Al – Paul Simon song; Yuletide treat)

Have You Met the New Guy in Accounting? (Geico “Happier than a Camel on Wednesday” Commercial; Yuletide treat)

2025:

FEBRUARY: Your Heart Has Led You Well (Graceling Realm; Candy Hearts Exchange fic)

A Lienid in the Dark (Graceling Realm; Candy Hearts Exchange treat)

MARCH: All the Happy Returns (Harry Potter: Remus Lupin)

JULY: Why Can't You Love Me Back? (Murderbot TV show)

NOVEMBER: No Protocol (Murderbot TV show)

DECEMBER: Until the Winter Gala (Graceling Realm; Yuletide fic)

Writing-related things I did in in the past 4+ years:

• Continued to be part of my small, local writers' group. We sometimes joke that we're a social group of writers rather than a writing group, because sometimes when we gather, no one actually has any writing to share... But it's nice to have a group of friends who share writing as a passion, and our conversations often do circle around writing in one way or another. It continues to amuse me that they're all serious nonfiction writers, and then I show up with my weird fantasy fiction :D

• Continued my weekly-ish writing meet-ups with a friend. Most of the time I write and she works on D&D campaigns, although occasionally we have other creative pursuits. One time, she coached me through a new sewing skill instead!

• Also had some writing meet-ups with a friend during my time in Berlin (summer 2024) and had some fascinating conversations about our very different writing processes. (She asks for a prompt, combines it with some motifs from one of her own dreams, closes her eyes for a couple seconds and has the whole plot in front of her, then writes it all down. Wild!) The same friend also organized a sort of workshopping/sharing/creative circle during my time there and it ended up being AMAZING. It was just three of us; one person tried out a bizarre and brilliant modern dance piece she'd been creating in her mind for a while, one came in with an idea for a song that we then ended up brainstorming and creating together, and I felt comparatively mundane, because I merely shared a piece of writing!

• Continued to participate in writing workshops when I could, for example during the annual local writing festival. There was also an excellent writing conference hosted by a library in Florida (of all places) that I heard about through a friend and was able to attend because everything was still online that year. (January of 2022.) They had fantastic workshops! And my little local library has had a series of workshops with a writing teacher whose style works really well for me – she has a specific technique of keeping us writing with an ongoing series of prompts that I find incredibly generative. So I've written at least one complete original story, and various useful bits toward other stories I want to write, and some nonfiction reflections as well. She even made us draw one time! Despite having no drawing skills, I managed to draw something!

• Looking back, I did Camp NaNoWriMo in April 2022 and I see I also did Flash Fiction February that year...in which I apparently wrote ONE single piece of flash fiction. Oh well! These days it's definitely been more about in-person workshops than online challenges.

• Met and gushed over Abdi Nazemian, a YA author who I admire so much, after a talk he gave, in Berlin. It was me and an auditorium full of German high school students, so I was not exactly the intended target audience, but it was wonderful!

• Also went to some librarian conferences where I got to hear absolutely fantastic authors speak.

• Had the amazing good fortune to participate in not one but two writing retreats through a local foundation that has a beautiful residence in the countryside. The first was an annual retreat for teachers that they offer during school breaks – you put your name in and get chosen by lottery, and I was lucky enough to get a spot. We spent the week in this beautiful place, surrounded by snowy woods, with the daytime to myself and then nice chats over dinner with the other teachers. This was in early 2025 (although it already feels like years ago...) and by that point it had been so long since I'd had the time or brain space for writing that I pretty much spent my time that week excavating the question, “Wait, what did I used to enjoy writing, back when I wrote?” rather than getting to dive straight in and tackle a big writing project. But it was still very valuable, to have that time to even start thinking about my writing again.

• And then the second retreat was at the same beautiful location but specifically focused on grief, offered in conjunction with our local hospice. It was only a weekend (so about a day and a half, all told) but it finally gave me the time and space to slow down enough to write out my whole experience of being with my mom throughout the night she died. The retreat was in September 2025 and I had been needing to do this writing since my mom died in May 2022. So it was a deeply appreciated opportunity.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted? [AND] Looking back, was your fandom involvement (modding, cheerleading, fest participation, etc.) more, less, or about what you'd predicted?

Uh...can't even answer these questions, it's been too long!

What's your favorite story of the year?

Fun question! And hard to say. I'm proud of my Cabin-Pressure-at-Purim fic, and the work I put into my Yuletide fic for the “We Are a Picturesque Small Town And We Refuse To Be The Setting For Your Romantic Comedy” fandom (a delightful microfandom that got requested in Yuletide – the canon is a McSweeney's story – and people took it up with gusto). Honestly, I think I've enjoyed variety – writing a lot of different things in a lot of small fandoms.

And I do have a fondness for “Shiver at the Beauty,” because it's a short fic but I wrote it over a long period of time, starting one summer and finishing the next, and it has a lot of my own feelings in it about the landscapes of the place I'm from. Plus, I read it aloud to two (RL, non-fandom) friends, something I would normally never do but I was trying to push myself out of my comfort zone, and they received it rapturously, which was so unexpected and heartwarming!

What's your favorite fandom fest/project of the year?

Honestly, just the fact of participating in fests at all seems to be what's kept me writing and posting even the small amount that I did. If I look at the fics listed above, about three quarters of them only got written because of a fest! So: apparently there are fests, and then also I occasionally have a feeling and express it through CMBYN fic (or whatever fandom is currently channeling my emotions). Those appear to be the only two options. (Fic-wise, at least. Writing workshops and retreats have been the biggest help for my original writing.)

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Hm, risks? I don't know. Continuing to branch out into more fandoms? Diving into writing drabbles and such for obscure Yuletide fandoms I would never have thought to try out otherwise? Well, and on a much more serious note, writing my own grief about losing my mom into a fic about Andromeda Tonks and her bereavements... But that's not so much a risk as a way of coping. Writing is how I survive.

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year?

Once again, just to keep writing, at all, in any form. The practice is what matters – keeping writing current in my mind as a thing I even remember that I do. Maybe go back through all these bits and pieces I've been creating through those writing workshops at my library and see about turning some of them into complete works.

Most fun story:

The Cabin Pressure crew celebrating Purim in midair :-) Also, the (non-)romcom in a town that refuses to be a setting for romcom.

Most sexy story [AND] Story with the single sexiest moment:

...Every time I'm confronted with this question, my writing has diverged even further from the very concept this question implies. I do not and perhaps never have written sexy stories. I'm not AGAINST them. They just don't seem to happen.

If anything, as usual, it would be the Call Me By Your Name fics. That canon is so innately sensual, any fic can't help but be steeped in it.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

Always love this question! Nothing particularly profound this time around, though. Maybe:

“Four, Not One,” made me think closely about each of the four students in El's cohort (Aadhya, Liu, Chloe, and El) and what defined each of them.

“Like a River Mare Home at Last” let me try out Fire's perspective for the first time. (Everything else I'd written for the Graceling Realm series so far focused on a different set of characters.)

“No Protocol” let me get inside the viewpoint of SecUnit 3 from the Murderbot books, which was delightful. Three is like the very opposite of Murderbot in this incredibly wholesome way.

And “500 Words for Elio” finally gave me the chance to think about who the Call Me By Your Name characters might be if aged up into the present day, a concept that had been lurking in the back of my head for a while.

Hardest story to write:

Nothing springs to mind; I haven't written anything beyond pretty straightforward one-shots in a while. I did struggle some with “Was There a Shadow, Was There Nothing” (my first fic for the Watson and Holmes comics), trying to get the details right for the world of these particular characters.

And I was a little stuck on my most recent Yuletide assignment, because I matched on Graceling Realm yet again and then had this feeling like, wait, but I think I've already said everything interesting I had to say about these particular characters? But I found an in (a quippy opening line + a characters-who-fundamentally-like-each-other-hanging-out-and-bantering vibe that is admittedly maybe too comfortably in my wheelhouse) and I think it worked out okay.

Biggest surprise:

Maybe writing about Saf (a character I don't like very much in the book!) from the Graceling Realm series, in “A Lienid in the Dark” – someone had such a good prompt that I couldn't help it. And I've been surprised/pleased to end up writing for a number of those obscure, tiny fandoms that make Yuletide so great – like writing fic for a Paul Simon song and a Geico commercial and, yes, the delightful McSweeney's piece “We Are a Picturesque Small Town and We Refuse to Be the Setting for Your Romantic Comedy.”

And I hadn't ever expected to write Murderbot fic – I love the books, but they never really inspired me in the direction of fic, either reading it or writing it. (I think because the books are so internal to Murderbot's perspective; there isn't as much of the inter-character dynamic stuff that usually makes me want to explore a world in writing.) But then the TV show came and hit me in the FEELS. Literally, I wrote a fic that was all about Gurathin and his tortured FEELINGS, written in a series of segments to explore my feelings about Gurathin's feelings in real-time as the last few episodes of the show unfolded. (“Why Can't You Love Me Back?”)

List of WIPs:

Oh, I don't even know at this point. Endlessly, the Tonks-and-Remus-are-both-bi fic that at this point may never get finished. (Although I did pull it out and poke a bit at it earlier this year!) The start of a John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme fic that apparently I'd thought of writing as a treat for someone in Yuletide one year, but didn't get any further than the opening paragraph, and completely forgot about it until I stumbled across the document a couple weeks ago. Oh! And a Check Please podfic that's all recorded except for the last small section, plus I've already plotted out all these musical cues and done much of the sound mixing...but then ran out of time to continue with it like...three years ago? And have still never gotten back to it. That one I do want to finish.

Total fics posted (over the course of 4 years!): 26

Total word count posted: 34,082