year in fic: 2025

[sword_logic]

word count for posted works: 5,366 words
word count for unposted works (incl. wips): 121,009 words
total word count: 126,375 words

...wow, that is so much more than i thought i wrote this year.

trust fall
one piece, zoro/sanji, rated M
5,388 words — chapter 1 of 10

uh... jeez, not really sure what happened this year. lol. well, i mean, i do know what happened—i struggled really hard with wanting to write a fake relationship fic (an ongoing struggle from last year; i created the document that became trust fall in june 2024), lost steam multiple times for multiple reasons, and picked away at writing stuff i don't intend to post. i continued on with what i did last year, picking someone else's fics to rewrite; that accounts for about 36k words, and it was really valuable. whenever i felt myself burning out or otherwise grinding to a halt, i'd pull up one of these documents and keep plunking away. it feels a lot like sketching to warm up; writing just to put words on digital paper, not really thinking about what i'm doing or agonizing over word choice or anything, just moving the required muscles. i also wrote about 17k in actual fic that's not for posting either, mostly silly stuff for this modern AU. the rest of the wordiness has, like, a +/- 6k or so to it; i did not set up my spreadsheet very well to track the way i ended up working on trust fall, and a lot of it ended up in my document of cut fragments, but whatever. i definitely cracked 100k words (SOMEHOW) no matter how it's counted.

writing trust fall was a lot more challenging than i thought it would be, in a lot of different ways. this fic fought me hard on the way out; that's partially due to several new things i wanted to try while writing it, and partially just Life Life-ing for a chunk of the year. for several months at the start of the year, i really struggled with that feeling of wanting so badly to write X and it not coming out right in any way at all. so much of what i tried before i decided to turn this into a humorous, low-stakes fic ended up feeling so forced and so unlike my own writing that it really put me off of working on it for a long time. i'm really glad i had that bolt of inspiration to strip everything else away and lean into the inherent absurdity of a fake relationship setup. i've said this over and over, but i'm really excited to get this out into the world.

the only goal i set for myself last year was to write a trope i love, and specifically to keep working on this fake relationship fic, and that's exactly what i did this year! just one goal, but it fought me hard, lol. i'm glad i finished off the first draft.

for 2026, i'm going to keep my goals pretty simple:

• finish posting trust fall
• be kind to myself about a weekly posting schedule, and give myself wiggle room if i need extra time to edit between chapters
• finish the not-for-posting fic rewrite i've been picking at this year... so that i have a Bedtime Story to read whenever i want

onward!