katzenfabrik

1. Number of fics posted

Six, totalling 21,457 words

2. Fandoms

One TGCF fic (my first in that fandom!) and five MDZS/CQL fics.

3. Categories

M/M: 3
Gen: 2
F/M: 1
Multi: 1

4. Best title

This Grey Artery: the fic is largely about driving on the motorway, and the title is taken from a poem about a motorway. I think the phrase captures the emotional ambivalence of the fic, though the fic is more hopeful than the poem.

5. Weakest title

Kindness, for which I fell back on the tactic of scraping about in the fic itself for a fitting phrase and ended up with a single word. I wrote this fic in four countries (China, Switzerland, Germany and Norway) and the bulk of it was done while I was backpacking with my mum, so you can see I didn't have a lot of resources to spare for titling!

6. Best opening

Work From Home:

NSFW

Song Lan was about halfway to balls deep in Xue Yang when the phone rang.

7. Best ending

Also Work From Home!

Spoiler (for a <2000-word fic)

The doorbell rang. To his horror, Song Lan heard the noise both from Xue Yang’s hallway and, with a split second’s delay, echoing up from the phone’s speaker on the floor.

8. Looking back, did you post more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?

Definitely fewer! I thought I would write much more on my sabbatical than I ended up being able to. Then, towards the end of the sabbatical, I started writing something that required a little bit of research and fell into a rabbit hole that lasted for weeks on end, but didn't end up with me writing the damn fic. This was also very much due to work and work stress expanding to fill all available time as soon as I went back to the office in July. I didn't post anything after that until the Songxuexiao Exchange in December.

9. What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?

Qin Su/Wen Ning, in Kindness. It's less that I would have been surprised about writing that pairing, and more that the enormous multishipper spinny wheel in my head has so many stops on it that I can't really ever guess where the dial will land!

Actually, while writing this story, I was thinking of it as the initial part of an eventual Qin Su/Wen Ning/Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji polyship get-together, which sophia_sol and I had been discussing earlier in the year. That's a ship that you could work well into a sedoretu, as I don't believe all of the connections would be romantic/sexual, although iirc we didn't map out definitive moiety assignments for each character.

10. What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.

To Share Quilt and Pillow. It was my first time writing beefleaf (a TGCF ship), which I'd been wanting to do for a long time, and it was also a remix of a big favourite fic of mine, headstone's panting like a dog at the edge of your bed. Exploring how the characters might have acted and seen the world as children was very enjoyable.

11. Okay, NOW your most popular story

Work From Home/Overtime (it's a two-part series). Songxuexiao fans are horny and love power play and unintended consequences.

12. Sexiest story?

Work From Home/Overtime again. Actually, that's the only story I posted in 2025 that has any sexual content in it. I do think it makes up the average very well.

13. Saddest story?

This Grey Artery, though that's a cheat because I had to give it a hopeful ending.

14. Most fun?

Call Me Zichen. Spot all the Moby-Dick references!

15. Story with single sweetest moment?

Kindness: either the happy ending or, for my money,

spoiler

the scene where Qin Cangye turns out to be supportive of Qin Su's love for Wen Ning, and then Wen Qing accepts her into her family-

16. Most fucked-up story?

I didn't post anything truly fucked up this year, but Work From Home/Overtime has infidelity, dom drop and

NSFW

a dubiously consented-to facial.

17. Hardest story to write?

Of the posted ones, definitely Call Me Zichen, because my exchange assignment—which was essentially just "Song Zichen + the opening of Moby-Dick"—was at once so perfectly suited to my interests and such a challenge. I spent most of the exchange creation period in another research rabbit hole about the Maritime Silk Road and doubted strongly that I'd get anything like the whole story down on the page.

18. Easiest/most fun story to write?

Work From Home/Overtime. Put a blorbo in a situation and then just keep making it worse!

19. Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?

Not really, although it was interesting to write a missing scene (Song Lan talking to Baoshan sanren on her mountain after the eye transfer) that I'd written before, this time with a very different mood and interpretation of her character.

20. Most overdue story?

Call Me Zichen. Of the four SXX Exchange mods, one posted their work early and the rest of us were working almost to the last possible moment, our deadline extensions extended multiple times! You can tell that I am becoming older and wiser because this year I only needed one all-nighter to finish my exchange fic, not two.

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

Okay, so, this is kind of embarrassing but I'm going to tell you anyway.

I haven't actually read Moby-Dick all the way through.

What I have done: watched the Patrick Stewart film many times over the years; read the SparkNotes guide (ouch!); talked about the story and its themes with my mum and zarkonnen many times over the years and especially in-depth this autumn. I once flipped through a Romanian copy of the novel in a café in Sibiu, before admitting to myself that I wasn't going to steal a book originally written in English and learn Romanian just to read it. While working on Call Me Zichen, I also read several papers about the novel and listened to a large chunk of the audiobook. (Someone put this great LibriVox recording by Stewart Wills onto Apple Podcasts.) It still felt pretty risky writing a xianxia OT3 version of the story in this condition!

What did I learn? Herman Melville's writing is wonderful. I still want to finish reading/listening to the novel even now that I've posted the fic. You can get away with a lot by blagging and unsustainable writing habits... oh no.

22. What are your fic writing goals for 2026?

I have a great many WIPs that I would really like to finish: chief among them the Qin Su fic I've been writing as a gift for real_ghost for years, and the Lan Xichen whump fic I started in the summer, alongside sophia_sol writing their own LXC whump.

It would be fun to write something for a new fandom, but I have no thoughts yet on what that might be.

Blank list of questions, taken from shipperslist's post:

Number of fics posted
Fandoms
Categories
Best title
Weakest title
Best opening
Best ending
Looking back, did you post more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
Okay, NOW your most popular story
Sexiest story?
Saddest story?
Most fun?
Story with single sweetest moment?
Most fucked-up story?
Hardest story to write?
Easiest/most fun story to write?
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
Most overdue story?
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
What are your fic writing goals for 2026?