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…
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!
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.
July was a bit of a mixed month. I’ve started my freelancing for real – I had 3 assignments – , I tried to keep up with reviewing (I clearly failed at that), I squeezed in some SPFBO reading and overall managing some related stuff, I also had a bit of holiday, and all the while I somehow tried to find a balance between all of my work, responsibilities and relaxing and doing some crafting. In the end, what had to give was spending time on social media. Of course there were a few other reasons behind my absence than time issues (anxiety, and getting fed up are amongst these), but I’d rather not go into details. Anyway, I’m always available to chat and do look at my messages, but I don’t keep track of people’s posts/tweets as much and probably miss pretty much everything. If you need me, give a shout, I’m never too far away 🙂