In March 2024, TheBlossomCommunity_ put out a call for judges. I took a chance and volunteered for the Blossom Awards 2024, not knowing what I was getting myself into. And I loved it.

I then volunteered to judge other awards. People started asking me to read their books and give them feedback, so I started looking at review books around the site, thinking about how I could do that, considering rubrics. In April, I published In My Opinion. Feedback requests, reviews, directing editing—it definitely kept me busy. And, since I didn't know what I was doing, I made mistakes.

A lot of mistakes.

It turns out some awards require the judges to read entire books instead of just the first five chapters. Silly me didn't think to check judging criteria before signing up left, right, and center. Also, I found out I have a helium hand (thank you, SeraDrake, for coining that phrase). It took the simple sentence "Put me where you need me!" and burial beneath multiple categories across several awards for me to realize I was overextending myself.

And then there was this weird thought I had that reading one chapter a week of the books on my list would work. Somehow, I missed the very obvious flaw that it would take an inordinately long time to read most books, which guaranteed I would end up with a huge backlog. Further compounding the problem was my application to join TheBlossomCommunity_ and my "yes" to join -Chrysalis_Realm when they asked me to come on board as an editor, judge, and reviewer. Because giving myself more work was such a brilliant idea, after all, especially with me underestimating the time it would take me to complete each review.

At least I had enough sense to decline all the communities who have asked me since then.

As the work piled up and I realized all the flaws in my plan, I started thinking about how to do things better in the future. There are several reviewers and hosts around the site who run their own awards, and I thought that might be the answer. And then I threw that out, because there's more to running an award than just reading and judging the books, and who needs all that extra hassle?

But I felt bad about all the patient people on my personal list getting neglected because I over-committed myself as a judge, and I wanted to make it up to them. Beyond (finally) finishing their reviews.

I already had two scored review categories. And self-reported genres by applicants to my personal and community review books.

So, here we are. I'm doing my own award. And everybody wins.

*****

12/26/2024: My original intention was to publish this book in its entirety (along with all the results) on January 1st. But...I don't have all the results done yet, and the anticipation is killing me. So, I'll start posting now, one chapter a day. And keep reading and reviewing. 😊