Making of SakurAiba EXCHANGE '14
Dear SakurAiba shippers!
First of all we want to thank all participants in this years edition of SakurAiba EXCHANGE for hard work on your stories. We do hope you had fun while writing fics, receiving them and kyaaing all over our precious OTP. Big thank yous to all who left such encouraging comments, thanking us for this project. We hope that our selection and assignments were accurate and you didn't have any difficulties with them.
Now, we would like to let you know how this fun and exciting project looked like from our side and believe us, it wasn't that easy as it may seem.
As you all know, this is third edition of this project, practically built from the scratch by us (syunikiss1990and tsuchi8562). We noticed slow decrease of SakurAiba fics so we decided to do something about it. Practically, we spent our free time to maintain this Exchange to make all of us happy. Give some fun to everyone who decides to participate or just wants to read story about our OTP. However, this year few problems appeared. Troubles, which made us think is it worth it? should we do next edition in 2015?
We are aware that RL can be hard and tough. We know very well, that sometimes no matter how much you want to participate, something happens and you simply can't do that. This year 1/3 of people who signed up didn't finish their assignments. 33 per cent of participants. A few didn't give any sign, no matter how many mails we sent. Fortunately we were able to pinch-hit ourselves and our friend jadere_star could write a short one-shot as well (thank you so much for that dear). Taking under consideration our busy lives, having to write two good stories on a short notice was quite a challenge. Even experienced writers would have difficulties with that.
Apart from this, there were a few who couldn't make the deadline. This isn't a big problem, taking in consideration they let us know that they will be late. There is no shame in asking for a bit more time simply because your RL asked for more time and making it too hard to finish the fic on time. But as everyone has noticed, this and the problem stated before, forced us to move the date to start posting.
Lastly, we noticed there are still a few people who didn't comment underneath the fic written for them, also a shocking 1/3 of the people who joined. This isn't fair to the one who put his or her hard work inside this fic so we ask everyone to please check if you left a comment underneath the fic written for you. If you didn't please leave at least a short thank you to let the author know you read it.
Don't get us wrong, we don't want to point fingers or blame anyone for these happenings, but we just want to let everyone know how hard this year has been for us. What was supposed to be a fun event slowly turned into a nervous mess for us, taking out a lot of joy ourselves, which is the most important part of this project. That's why we started to wonder if it's worth it.
Because right now, we both aren't sure if we want to do this again. Of course you can never know in advance how it will go, but with this year being so stressful we don't think we can take another year like this. That's why we will have to think very careful if it's worth it for us to go again next year or if this year's edition has been our last. And believe us, it's not a choice we like or even want to make but we have to take or own peace of mind in consideration as well, so we hope you can understand this.
First of all we want to thank all participants in this years edition of SakurAiba EXCHANGE for hard work on your stories. We do hope you had fun while writing fics, receiving them and kyaaing all over our precious OTP. Big thank yous to all who left such encouraging comments, thanking us for this project. We hope that our selection and assignments were accurate and you didn't have any difficulties with them.
Now, we would like to let you know how this fun and exciting project looked like from our side and believe us, it wasn't that easy as it may seem.
As you all know, this is third edition of this project, practically built from the scratch by us (syunikiss1990and tsuchi8562). We noticed slow decrease of SakurAiba fics so we decided to do something about it. Practically, we spent our free time to maintain this Exchange to make all of us happy. Give some fun to everyone who decides to participate or just wants to read story about our OTP. However, this year few problems appeared. Troubles, which made us think is it worth it? should we do next edition in 2015?
We are aware that RL can be hard and tough. We know very well, that sometimes no matter how much you want to participate, something happens and you simply can't do that. This year 1/3 of people who signed up didn't finish their assignments. 33 per cent of participants. A few didn't give any sign, no matter how many mails we sent. Fortunately we were able to pinch-hit ourselves and our friend jadere_star could write a short one-shot as well (thank you so much for that dear). Taking under consideration our busy lives, having to write two good stories on a short notice was quite a challenge. Even experienced writers would have difficulties with that.
Apart from this, there were a few who couldn't make the deadline. This isn't a big problem, taking in consideration they let us know that they will be late. There is no shame in asking for a bit more time simply because your RL asked for more time and making it too hard to finish the fic on time. But as everyone has noticed, this and the problem stated before, forced us to move the date to start posting.
Lastly, we noticed there are still a few people who didn't comment underneath the fic written for them, also a shocking 1/3 of the people who joined. This isn't fair to the one who put his or her hard work inside this fic so we ask everyone to please check if you left a comment underneath the fic written for you. If you didn't please leave at least a short thank you to let the author know you read it.
Don't get us wrong, we don't want to point fingers or blame anyone for these happenings, but we just want to let everyone know how hard this year has been for us. What was supposed to be a fun event slowly turned into a nervous mess for us, taking out a lot of joy ourselves, which is the most important part of this project. That's why we started to wonder if it's worth it.
Because right now, we both aren't sure if we want to do this again. Of course you can never know in advance how it will go, but with this year being so stressful we don't think we can take another year like this. That's why we will have to think very careful if it's worth it for us to go again next year or if this year's edition has been our last. And believe us, it's not a choice we like or even want to make but we have to take or own peace of mind in consideration as well, so we hope you can understand this.