It's hard for me to write this, especially since I'm really not good at breaking bad news. But for those of you who have not read Quicksilver's announcement on our weblog already, I regret to announce that Sainan no Kekka is coming to an end. I know this is very sudden, but I'll explain.

Lately both Quicksilver and I have been dealing with personal issues as well as other issues such as school and work. I'd prefer to keep the nature of these issues private, but as you can imagine, this has been very stressful on both of our parts. We've been trying to keep up with SnK, and so far, we've managed to squeeze by. However, it's come to a point within the past month that neither of us believe we can continue to write the story within reader expectations because of the demands on us in real life.

Also, we've been working on an original novel together for the past year or so, and though we enjoy writing fanfiction, we do hope to become published authors one day, and so obviously we'd like to focus on the original novel more than the fanfiction novel. The novel does not require as much time, as we don't have weekly deadlines set, but we do try to work on that regularly as well. Any of you who also have worked on or published original works know that it's more challenging, but ultimately more rewarding than fanfiction.

We've been debating this for a few months now, off and on, probably since Christmas. We didn't want to alarm you with this until we'd made a concrete decision, but we finally realized that the Arc is coming to an end and we had to make a decision quickly. So we did. We had a few choices. We could either A. put SnK on hiatus until further notice, or B. End it early at the end of the Betrayals Arc. Neither option was very pleasing, but we knew our readers would want some sense of closure, so we chose option B. While it's doubly unpleasant for us to have to force an ending on SnK when it wasn't scheduled to end for another Arc yet, we believe that it would be better than to leave readers hanging forever. Act 9.3 has been removed from the page, and 9.2 will be the last update to SnK. We might do a few sidestories in the months to come, but that will be at our discretion, if we ever feel like working more on this. Update notices to our novel (at the moment titled "Voices" and which will soon have its own site) will be posted to the SnK page, if anyone's interested.

Again, we are very very sorry for the suddenness of this announcement, but we felt we needed to make it now and get it over with. The reason we deleted 9.3 is that the end of the semester is coming up for me, and my school plus my military commitment is getting crazy, and as always, QS has her job to worry about. If there were any way we could have done otherwise, we would, but as it stands, 9.2 will be the end of the fic. Look for it to be posted probably Saturday next week at the latest.

We thank you for all the support you've given us in the past year and a half. Without readers like you, we would have never made it this far. I regret that we weren't able to complete the project like we've been saying we would. Believe me, I feel just as bad and angry about it as you probably do, but this is the best arrangement for us at present. Please don't hesitate to contact us, and if we ever publish our novel, we expect you all go to buy a copy! ^_^

Gerald Tarrant, Sainan no Kekka co-author
26 March 2002