SPFBO 7 started off on June 1st and as many of you know, the Asylum is not a judging blog anymore. But not all of us stepped back from the competition. In this post I’d like to talk about why I made the decision of stepping back, how SPFBO affected my (blogging) life, and highlight all the gems I got to find thanks to the competition. It will be a long post, so buckle up. I’ll try to keep the rambling to a minimum, but no promises…
The day everyone waited for! We finally reveal our SPFBO 6 Finalist, which also means we say goodbye to 4 of our semi-finalists. We are sad to see them go, but only one can survive.
In this post the team looks back on SPFBO 5 sharing our experiences and we’ll also point out a couple of books we enjoyed and you might have missed in the sea of other great books! At the end of the post, you’ll find Amazon links to each book mentioned in this post. We hope you’ll check them out!
Team RockStarlit BookAsylum reviews the SPFBO 5 finalist, Fortune’s Fool by Angela Boord. Thoughts and opinions are all our own.
Team RockStarlit BookAsylum reviews the SPFBO 5 finalist, Spark City by Robert J Power. Thoughts and opinions are all our own.
Well, obviously this is a little after the fact (I was just a little bit late getting these done in time to fit into the schedule) but here are my final DNFs!
Thank you to all the participants! It’s been a blast!
This five months went away in a blink as we were busy with reading, reviewing, talking and ultimately deciding which books to roll forward and which to cut. I think I can say all four of us – Jen, Belle, Nick and myself – found new books to love, authors to follow. It was overall a pleasant experience and I’m happy I got to lead my team so far. But Phase 1 is at its end, and we have the unpopular task of cutting 3 of the remaining 4 books and reveal Team RockStarlit BookAsylum’s finalist!
Now that our four semi-finalists are out and about (they fly out of the nest so quickly *sniff*), there is one last thing to do before we reveal our finalist! We have 5 books left we have to say goodbye to and believe me, in some cases that’s not an easy thing to do.
We decided to eliminate 5 more books before we start announcing our semi-finalists, so the next time you hear from us, we’ll bring good news! But before we can make anyone happy – or more anxious – first we have to be the harbringers of bad news. I know, I know, the job sucks, but hey, someone has to do it, and we signed up for it willingly (well, some of us did, I was talked into it by Belle, so blame her if you must!)
Err, um, anyway, this means we’ll be eliminating 21 books so far. I’m happy to report we are done slush piling, and we’ll discuss shortly which books we’ll roll forward to consider to be our semi-finalists and then finalist. Watch this space people, it really, really gets interesting!
This means we’ll be eliminating 16 books so far, just a tiny bit over half of the books in our group. We are getting there! We’ll probably have one more reaping (looking at early November) before we announce our first semi-finalist, so keep your eyes open!
Today Team RockStarlit BookAsylum is going to say goodbye to 5 books, some we enjoyed reading, some not so much. This means we’ll be eliminating 11 books so far, so almost half of our entrants will be out of the game.
I fell a bit behind on writing up my DNF posts for those books we already eliminated from the competition. So far I’ve slush piled 24 books, we’ve cut 16 and I have 4 books (at the moment) I want to consider further. I’m hoping to finish slush piling by the end of the week (November 3rd) and sit down with my team to talk about how to go on. I suspect to have our first semi finalist announced pretty soon. Things will accelerate in November, so keep your eyes open!