Fest no Jutsu 2023 - Organising
Fest no Jutsu 2023 has wrapped up with creator reveals. I'm trying to organise my own thoughts on it and hope some of them might be useful/relevant. First, a link to the event.
This was an interesting one because Fest no Jutsu 2022 was a little later than planned, very last-minute, and as a result not so big. We took some of the lessons from that and made sure to put the word out in advance this time. The final result was very good: last year we had 15 works, this year we had 25. The server hasn't massively grown in that period, either, so it's purely driven by people being more interested and engaged.
After FnJ 2022 wrapped up, I ran an informal server poll to see whether there was more interest in a prompt week, a fest, or an exchange for 2023, and 'fest' won by a reasonable margin. We've run server exchanges in the past but there's a critical mass needed for that to work, and I think we're just at the lower threshold. The low-commitment nature of a fest also helps draw in people who otherwise maybe wouldn't be interested, and also means much less moderation work so it's easier to organise.
More mods were helping coordinate the fest this time around, which I think helped get more community spirit going. It also meant less of a wait to get answers to fest-specific questions. The discord members were also more experienced with fests -- quite a few took part in the last round -- so that helped a lot as well.
I'm planning another server poll to get some ideas of what to do next year, and also to ask for suggestions on how to improve things. One of the mods suggested an upper wordcount limit (as a guideline, not a solid rule) as some people found their stories getting away from them a bit and weren't able to finish their works. Some encouragement to keep the submissions concise might have helped avoid the fics from sprawling too much, or at least it seems worth a try next time.
There is one point of friction, though. Anonymity, while an important part of the exchange and fest process, makes it a little awkward to run events that are focused on a specific discord server. Everyone's writing away but nobody can talk about it because we're all writing for each other. It's a bit funny but also can be awkward over a longer period because writers are a social bunch and there's always this urge to share what we're doing and what we're learning. This year the server's had some non-fest writing events as well which I think make for a nice break and give a social outlet.
Overall I'm really happy with how Fest no Jutsu 2023 turned out, though I wish I'd been a bit more productive personally. That's about the same for every writing event I take part in, I suppose! Bring on 2024.
