Can you believe it’s already the end of 2019?! It definitely was a roller coaster of a year for me. It was also crazy busy, so I decided to take things easier in the second half of the month. Holidays are coming and I need a bit of a break, so posts won’t be as frequent as usually. But don’t worry, we won’t leave you alone for too long 😉
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.
Hoo boy, but November was crazy busy as we got to the end of SPFBO 5’s Phase 1 and I tried to catch up to myself after my little time out in October – with some more time out. Oh well. I had some needed down time and I also got offered to work from home, which resulted in a week spent getting both my room and office ready for the switch – meaning I had to clean, sort things, find place for everything and make my desk ready to function as it should, instead of a surface where I could throw clothes and stuff in a heap.
Er, yeah, so, a lot happened both in my personal life and on the blog, and now I’ll show you what we were up to here at RockStarlit BookAsylum.
Please keep in mind these are personal thoughts only. This book has already been eliminated from the competition, but at least one of us liked it enough to write a full review.
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…
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.
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…
Congrats to Anela Deen for being an SPFBO5 semi-finalist!
Congrats to Sonya M. Black for becoming our finalist for SPFBO5!