Every year I try to do a little recap of what I did, what went well, what didn't go so well, and what I want to do next year. Members can find past versions of those here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2020 (I don't know what happened to the 2021 one, I can't seem to find it ¯_(ツ)_/¯). And somehow we are now at the end of yet another year! I find it useful to remember what I actually did, write down what I'm proud of, and try to be intentional about what comes next.
Here's what I did, and what I want to do in the next year if everything goes well. Will it? Who can say. The only thing I can do is be prepared and willing to try.
If you're a member, this is the work you've supported and will continue to support. If you're considering membership, this is what I'm up to!
☀︎ 2024 ☀︎
TESTED
After ten years of research, eight years of pitching, 26 rejections, and then nine months of absolutely absurd pedal to the medal work and travel, Tested became a reality. The show was co-distributed by CBC and NPR's Embedded, and I'm really proud of it.
If you haven't listened, please do? I worked SO hard on it, and I really genuinely think it's good and it will help you understand so much about not just sports, but the world at large. And if you're not someone who cares for audio, you can read the transcript of all the episodes (complete with annotations) on the website.
There are a lot of reasons I'm proud of Tested. I think the show itself is genuinely good, and especially useful if you're a little bit confused and overwhelmed by this "discourse." It braids history and modern narratives together, and provides not just a compelling and suspenseful story of an athlete trying to make it to the Olympics, but also all the ways in which we've policed women in sports through time.
I'm also really proud of the team's work on the back end of this — and frankly at my own ability to manage such a huge project. I had never made anything like this before. I had never worked with this many people, never tried to collaborate with two huge media outlets at once, never made a many part narrative series, never done a story with this much legal risk.
And we didn't just make a podcast. Along with the episodes, we published a website full of resources, sourcing, and further explorations of the topic. I wrote a newsletter about not just what we cut, but updates on sex testing that have happened since the show was published. I wrote several articles to go along with the series, and I did an absurd amount of press. Over the course of about six weeks, I said yes to nearly every single request for an interview. While in France "on vacation" I spent my days being a tourist and my nights on the phone with media outlets in the United States. I was interviewed or mentioned on over 100 different podcasts, articles, and newsletters.
And as of October 2024, the series had over 1.3 million downloads. I'm even more proud of the completion numbers — people who started episodes, overwhelmingly finished them. Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong has called the show a “masterpiece.” Several historians I interviewed for the show have joked that I ought to get an honorary PhD for it. Dr. Vanessa Heggie, a professor who studies sex testing, wrote that "Rose Eveleth has done more work than most academics (including me!) would or could.” The show has been named a Best Podcast of 2024 by Apple, Vulture, and the New York Times, and has been praised by New Scientist, Popular Science, TIME, the SF Chronicle and more. It's currently up for three different Sports Podcast Awards (you can vote for the show here, here, and here).
But perhaps more importantly to me, my inbox has been flooded with messages from listeners telling me that the show has helped them have hard conversations about sex, gender, and sports — particularly in the wake of the news surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who was accused of being somehow “not a woman” during the Olympics. Messages like this one: “I had a great, but slightly difficult, conversation about Imane Khelif today with my mom's college friend who was visiting her and I felt like I was able to articulate some stuff a lot better because of your work and she walked away like ‘let the woman box.’”
Then what?
Tested completed its run in August, and press wound down by September. (As an aside, I've recently been struck by how different the promotion tail is for a book and for a podcast. Even though they're the same amount of information and, in this case at least, work, a book has about a year's worth of stuff that happens after publication. A podcast gets about six weeks.)
I was then faced with the dreaded question: what's next?
I felt strongly that I should take most of the rest of the year easy. From January through August I was working from 5am to 10pm every single day of the week to make sure Tested hit its deadlines. I needed a break from that kind of pace and work.
So I went back to making art. I got back into the studio, I returned to glass blowing, and I enrolled in a welding course. I made a series of sculptures I'm quite pleased with.
You can read more about some of these here:
I also got back in the gym, and hit some PR's — a 220lb squat and a 275lb deadlift.
I also recalibrated, renamed, and relaunched my membership program under the name Cardiac Serpent, which is what you're reading this on now.
I reignited my excitement for my novel, PROJECT CUBENSIS, and worked out some plot and world building questions. This included going to some archives, marking up some old floor plans, and developing strong opinions about furniture. (Members will be getting more on this in the January newsletter.)
I took another pass through my non-fiction book proposal, PROJECT OSTOYAE, and had some good conversations with myself, my friends, and my amazing agent about where it's at and what I want to do with it.
I got re-involved with my union, and started working on some new projects to try and build power among writers and media workers.
And finally, I handed Advice for and from the Future off to a new team and guided them through the final stages of relaunching the show! Ozzy, Julia and Siona has a clear vision for what they want this podcast to be about and I'm really proud of them for making a show sustainably and with intention. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
☼ 2025 ☼
So... what's next?
Each year I do a little exercise that includes a bunch of questions about how I'm thinking about my work and my next steps. Many of those answers are personal and will stay that way, but here's one question and the top line of how I'm thinking right now.
What do you want? What matters to you? What doesn’t matter?
I want to make things that surprise people, and make them see the world in a new way. What matters to me is creativity and connection. I want to explore — shapes, spaces, worlds, ideas — in ways that are unique and interesting.
What matters to me is fidelity, honesty, exploration. I want to make things that feel genuine. That make me feel like I'm adding something to the world. That I'm getting at something in a new way. I want to feel good about the work because it came from me and is doing something I'm personally really interested in.
stories // sculptures // surprises
For many years I've told myself that I could never truly write fiction. That it was a nice little hobby, but that actually making a go of it for real was delusional at best and egotistical at worst. That even the few pieces I had published were a fluke — the result of my publishing connections from journalism and nothing more. This year I'm trying to break through that, and really let myself have a proper attempt at fiction and take it seriously.
make surprising work
So what does this means? It means I'm going to try and finish a novel next year, and write a novella, and submit some short stories. I'm going to keep working on my non-fiction book proposal. I'm going to make sculptures and try to show them even if just to friends. I'm going to try and learn how to weave baskets and get better at welding and try linocuts and maybe even oil paints. I'm going to keep organizing workers and try to get more involved in my local community. And I'm going to share with members here as I do those things
stay weird // be kind
(this ethos comes from my friend Ace Tilton Ratcliff)
→ onward and upward, as my dad always likes to say → come with me?
