What is SPFBO 9?  This is  a competition where authors of self-published fantasy can enter their work. The objective to find a winner out of the 300 entries submitted.  Ten judges (or judging teams) each receive 30 entrants.  Each judge/team will eventually submit one finalist to the second round where a winner will eventually be decided upon. Check out Mark Lawrence’s post here to look at this year’s entrants, judges and allocations list.  Also, check out this page to see all the lovely finalists and the scoreboard for Phase 2 of the competition.

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Okay, I realise that I’ve been very quiet in terms of posting about SPFBO.  Rest assured this is not a reflection on the Finalists or indeed my progress in reading them, rather that I have been more fixated on getting some reading under my belt before I started to post any reviews.

As you may know, for Phase 1 of the competition I was joined by the wonderful Critiquing Chemist, Sarah and her trusty boffin Jennie, who helped with the initial phase taking on board half of the book allocation and helping to choose our finalist (A Rival Most Vial).

For Phase 2 Sarah has taken a step back due to family commitments but Jennie was still keen to join me in reading through the finalists and scoring each one. However, Jennie also has less time for reading at the current time due to pressures that I won’t go into here and whilst she has been reading we’re both not sure  that she’ll manage to complete all the finalists before the end of the competition, and I certainly don’t want to add any additional pressure in that respect.

What does this mean going forward?

Well, as it currently stands I have now read 6 of the 9 finalists (i’ve started book 7 and I’m hoping to complete that and the remaining two books before the end of the month).  I thought I’d make that clear first in case there were any concerns that the finalists wouldn’t all be complete.

In terms of scoring, Jennie has read and scored some of the finalists, however, as we cannot guarantee that she’ll be able to read all of them before the deadline at this point I will score the books alone – this seems fair and consistent (to be honest, our tastes have aligned very well so far so I don’t think this will affect the overall scores in any sort of dramatic way).

With that in mind I’m going to start posting my reviews very soon, I’ll hopefully be posting one every four to five days.

That’s my update for now.  I’m so sorry that it’s taken me so long to post an update, but, as I mentioned, I’ve been concentrating more on reading than reviewing, and also I wanted to give my partner in books time to get through some of the finalists without adding any stress.

Watch this space, hopefully my first review will go live this forthcoming week.