amplificathon

Like many others, I have grown to be wary of fic WIPs over the years. Although many of them take you on a wonderful ride and finish beautifully, plenty get abandoned as well, and leave a sense of dissatisfaction at not having gotten to see the story end.

But I do love serialized storytelling. I love following a TV show week after week across a season. I love following a book series that comes out with new volumes every year or two. I love Homestuck, with its frequent little updates, and I am excited about catching up on Nightvale so that I can start waiting for new episodes twice a month. It's so nice getting a lovely bite of a story, small enough to not be overwhelming even on a busy day. It's nice to have a built-in period of anticipation and then the excitement of a new update, to be able to download the file already knowing how the reader interprets the characters, already knowing the premise and the world, getting to just dive into the next part and let it wash over me. It's nice to get to live with a story over the course of months instead of days because it is parceled out piece by piece.

And the thing that makes most podfic WIPs different from fic WIPs is: the story is finished! I may be choosing to wait for the next bit of performance before I continue the story, but I'm not forced to wait. If I decide that waiting is making me too unhappy, I can go to the text at any time and read as much of the story as I'd like. It won't be the same as hearing the podficcer's performance, of course, but I can let the podficcer's interpretation of previous chapters shape my experience of the later chapters even if I'm not hearing them performed.

So there's my pitch for podfic WIPs and why I adore them. And now, here are recs for three current podfic WIPs that I think are fantastic:

Revelations, Avengers, Loki/Thor, read by ann_ciudad and written by astolat

HOLY MOLY, this performance. I have been a huge fan of

ann_ciudad's since I first started listening to podfic. She had a 3-year hiatus from podficcing, and when she came back I spent a day allcapsing to anybody who cared to listen. I admit that I worried a little, though—were my expectations unrealistically high? Would I still enjoy her reading as much as I remembered?

I needn't have worried. This podfic is, in my opinion, far and away her best work yet. In between her posting new chapters, I keep relistening to what she's done so far, because I just want to sink deeper and deeper in. She has such amazing delicacy with the characters—there's one section with Loki thinking about Thor that took my breath away with the depth and complexity of emotions she layered into it. But since that's a bit spoilery, I'll instead share with you a snippet from chapter 1, the moment when I fell completely in love with this podfic:

Hands in My Hair, Hockey RPF, Patrick Kane/Andrew Shaw/Jonathan Toews, told by anna_unfolding

This piece is really special. It's actually an exception to what I said above about being able to read ahead in the fic, and that's because it's performance-first. Everything is created for the purpose of being performed, and the text is only released afterwards. It's a testament to how much can be expressed with vocal performance that the text only contains a tiny portion of the magic of this podfic. Like all of

anna_unfolding's work, it's intimate and immediate and vulnerable. It's D/s kink and very NC-17 (with lots of amazing sex noises) and is created unabashedly with the intent of being an erotic experience for listeners—a task at which, imo, it is extremely successful.

(Although there's no text to read ahead, Part 2 (of 3) wraps up as well as if it were the end, and so there's pretty much no danger of being trapped unsatisfied in the middle of a WIP)

I searched through for snippets for a couple minutes, but honestly, this performance is so fully and confidently itself from the start that I've decided to just share the first scene:

Letter to a G.I., Glee, Kurt/Blaine, read by nielrian, written by dyrnekeeper

This is a lovely little story so far, where Kurt and Blaine meet as adult actors co-starring in a movie.

nielrian is an engaging storyteller who always does a great job with character voices and brings out the mood of a story vividly. I'm not incredibly invested in the story just yet, but that's kind of perfect, because it means that I can just sit back and look forward to an update without feeling at all impatient. And when updates do come, It's really nice to get to spend another hour relaxing in this sweet story.

Here's a snippet from the part 1, where Blaine first asks Kurt on a date:

So there you have it! Three stories I'm currently getting in serialized form via podfic and very much enjoying.