the luminous outset became the interminable middle

I'm writing and posting this in response to the Fan in the Mirror challenge for Voiceteam: Mystery Box 2025.

Fandom, for me, for a long time now, has been about creating things. I’m no longer the lurker I once was. By creating things, I mean writing fic or recording podfic. For a while in the late 2000s, it was about writing meta and vidding. Though I’ve long abandoned vidding, I do sometimes write meta. I suppose that’s what you could call this. A reflection of what I’ve done over the past year and what I hope to accomplish in the future.

The best thing I’ve been a part of creating over the past year, by far, is Voiceteam. I volunteered to mod last Mystery Box and I also helped mod in May and I’ve loved both experiences. In a lot of ways, Voiceteam has become my fandom. The things I’m most proud of creating over the last 12 months are all Voiceteam adjacent.

I feel like Mystery Box from 2024 was all about filk. I’ve never really been into filk before beyond listening to the occasional song. I’ve never particularly sought it out, but something took over my brain and suddenly I was writing filk and performing filk and becoming obsessed with filk. Voiceteam madness, I guess. I think there were four different filks I participated in and three of those I wrote with varying levels of help. The funniest was rickrolling everyone during “guess that voice.” That paid off so well. “Thank You Voiceteam” came out funnier than I intended when the other people contributing picked parts that fit them perfectly. The other filks were great too.

I created nothing fannish between Mysterybox and May Voiceteam but I did manage to make progress on my third novel, so I suppose there are trade offs.

I continued the filk thing for May Voiceteam by creating a couple of welcome filks. “I Gotta Podfic” was the biggest work I’ve ever edited, so of course it was a filk. I’m super proud of how it came out and it was a great way to kick off May Voiceteam. Hiding the first of the mod dares at the end after everyone had already listened to it was diabolical and I loved doing it.

May Voiceteam was really all about being diabolical. Not really a fanwork in the traditional sense, but hiding messages and songs in the team channels made me so happy. And the payoff was fantastic when we hid their missions there. The Lorises giving us our own challenge inspired one of my favorite podfic based work: Mastermind. klb and I wrote and recorded an evil villain speech over the course of a couple of hours right before the deadline, and it is hilarious. That we pulled off something so perfect for the feeling of Voiceteam 2025 in such a short amount of time while under time pressure feels like the epitome of Voiceteam shenanigans. My Cooks project also made me really happy. So many people let me use their clips and it turned out so well. I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with a way to tie them all together, but I think I hit upon something that worked really well. We also did some really great meta in May all about how Voiceteam works. It felt very self-indulgent, but people really seemed to like listening to them and we had a lot of people show up live for the mod roundtable.

After Voiceteam, I did pod-together. I like how the project came out, but my general malaise about finding a fandom I’m into enough to create for brought me down a bit. The finished project is awesome, but I feel like I wasn’t as emotionally invested as I should have been. I struggled with completing my part and I’m not sure that pod-together is the event for me.

I’ve had a hard time over the past few years getting into any specific fandom for a show/movie/book and because of that I feel like I haven’t done as much writing as I would like. At the same time, I’m working on the aforementioned novel, so even if I had a fandom, I’m not sure I would be contributing much.

School started in August and my investment in fandom really took a hit. Between doing work stuff to make sure my classes are prepped, dealing with those classes during the day, and grad school, I haven’t had much energy to create things. My novel is on hold too. I’m hoping Mystery Box will give me an injection of creative energy. It’s between all of the things, so I should actually have time to devote to it.

I’m not sure what my fannish goals are for next year. I want to create more, but I don’t know what I want to create more of. I want to survive semester two of grad school. I’m looking forward to Voiceteam 2026 and all of that insanity. It’s like I get an injection of fannish energy twice a year now, and I would like to find something more consistent. Finding a fandom is highly serendipitous though, so I don’t know that I can plan for that. We’ll see what happens.

ETA: I wrote this a bit ago to test the challenge before we posted them. I have since become obsessed with The Pitt. I ended up writing about 30,000 words of fic about Trinity Santos and Yolanda Garcia in about two weeks. I also recorded a podfic that's over an hour long. I'm in the middle of editing a multivoice of another fic. I haven't really felt this way about a fandom in a long time, and it's nice. The Pitt come back January 8th, so I suspect my year is going to be creating things based on new episodes of that. I'm excited.