static_whisper | Fandom Snowflake Challenge (08)

Day #8: In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.

First, to provide a bit of context, I got started in certain fandoms as a writer. I wasn't quite done with a multi-chapter fic before I started uploading it to ao3, and I accidentally have more than a few people who are waiting for that fic to be done. (Actually, this could be said for two other fics as well.) Anyways, I hit a point in 2020 where I kind of felt nervous and/or sick at the thought of trying to continue those fics, trying to work on other works in progress, and for a bit, even logging into my ao3 where I'd see comments in my inbox asking if such-and-such fic was still on hiatus, asking when a new update would go up, or just 'please write more'. I struggled with creating anything, and this wall extended outside of fic to regular old blogging on other sites.

I needed to do something where I wasn't the writer. I looked at podfic resources, and I talked myself out of trying anything. I spent a lot of time arguing with myself about my vocal dysphoria and the quality of my voice. (New readers may benefit from 'Voiceteam 2021 Round 2: Commentary Challenge', which covers my acquired subglottic stenosis and permanently hoarse or raspy voice starting about three paragraphs in. I no longer have a warning in my ao3 profile about it, but most of that information still stands about needing to use a different recording and editing process in order to get a relatively 'nice' podfic voice compared to standard newbie advice.) I even felt a little guilty about trying to run away from feeling like some sort of dispensing machine because I wasn't on holiday during a global pandemic and still producing content for readers.

I'd guess that I started getting serious about giving podfic a go in the winter of 2020 and 2021, and I decided that I would make a separate fannish identity and ao3 just for podficcing. I believe most accounts were made somewhere in late January or early February of 2021, and my first podfic was uploaded to ao3 on 26 February 2021. (I suspect I'll get some sort of one year email for some of these accounts soon, but unless I were to do something special to mark the occasion, it's not a huge deal to pick one particular date.) Some offline factors interrupted my plans starting in September of 2021 and I need to reacquaint myself with the process now, but I'd say that my personal win for 2021 was giving podfic creation a shot.