September turned out to be a way busier month than I expected, and that’s saying something. With a twist of fate even I didn’t see coming, I ended up renting a flat. Official moving in day is October 1st. Things happened within 2 weeks basically. What started out as a casual looking around for flats resulted in my actually renting one. The funny thing is, I only really looked at 2 before jumping on the second one. I did not expect to move anytime before February, really. Oh well.
Have you ever wondered what might happen if you could throw a party of your choice and not only could you invite your MC(s) but other literary figures as well? In this feature I ask you to imagine exactly that scenario and some more. Meet Rainbow Maccabre and her guests and let’s get the party started! You can also read an excerpt from his book!
October was mostly about catching up, and cram in as many things as possible before I headed to the UK toward the end of the month. I had a great time both in London and Bristol – article coming soon, I promise, unlike the WorldCon one… – and it charged me with energy and good feels. It was awesome to meet old friends and make new ones and I already can’t wait for the next BristolCon.
But until I get myself together, take a look at what we were up to this past month. We are getting near the end of phase 1 in SPFBO and we are done with slush piling so we’ll start announcing our semi-finalists real soon. But we also read some other great books too, and hosted awesome authors.
August went away in a blink of an eye and I’m both sad and happy about it. I had some great times, but I also got damned behind on EVERYTHING. September will be about trying to catch up to myself.
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!
Tales from the Asylum is a new feature I came up with for SPFBO. I wanted to create a unique opportunity for the authors to show off their story telling skills by taking their characters and putting them in an asylum room to see how they would deal with the situation. A lot can happen in a closed space…
I told you things will get more interesting and here we are again, saying goodbye to 5 books. Some we enjoyed reading, some not so much. This batch was really difficult for me, because some of these did pick my interest, but at the end of the day, I had to let them go.
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.
The pokey person in the group is finally getting around to her first round of mini-reviews for my DNF’s! Please note, that this is only my opinion and my ratings, and these books still can end up as semi-finalists if one of my fellow judges deem them worthy. Once we have a couple of books all of us thinks won’t make it, Timy will write up announcement posts.