Good writing, one hopes, is always a main element, but after that every one has different preferences, and these will come into play. Some have no love of urban fantasy, perhaps, others may scorn a medieval setting, saying it is too common. In the end, the winners are the ones who have written books that happen to appeal to that particular set of judges. Had the book been published the year after or the year before, the result may well be different.

Which is why – although I adore being shortlisted and yes, I do think of it as both an endorsement and a validation – I would not be shattered if I wasn’t.

What I truly love about the Aurealis Awards (as compared to so many other sff awards) is that every eligible book is at least considered. Everyone has a chance.

This is a difficult comment to make without it sounding as though I’m insulting the average reader’s intelligence (which I am not) but I’m going to try to make it anyway:

I would imagine that Gilfeather is more than usually difficult to pick up as a second book without reading the first, because Kelwyn himself is a subtle and complex character and perhaps not so readily identifiable with as Blaze and Flame (and Tor Ryder) who are the more obviously ‘action’ characters carrying the main storyline of the trilogy as a whole. I confess that I became much fonder of him during book three than I had been for most of book two – it took a while to get to know him, so to speak. I don’t know the criteria for Aurealis nominations, but if they were trying to take Gilfeather in isolation, without all the important counterbalance and resonance from The Aware (let alone TheTainted which wasn’t around yet) then they would have hamstrung themselves when attempting to judge the storytelling craftsmanship; and if they were looking for strong central characters that would appeal to the widest part of the readership spectrum, they might have felt that Blaze and Flame were not prominent enough (too much like ‘supporting cast’) in this one book, and Kelwyn perhaps a bit too difficult for the average reader to immediately latch on to.

I’m not saying that that is the case, but it is one of the drawbacks of taking a chunk of a work in isolation and expecting it to be like the slice of cake I mentioned before.

I have a bias towards Gilfeather (Bk2 of the Isles of Glory), yet it wasn’t shortlisted, losing out to Bk3. And I wonder if the impact of the ending of Gilfeather was not lost on the judge(s) simply because they had not had the build up to that point from the beginning of Bk1. Much of Ruarth and the history of the Dustel Islanders comes in book1, not in Gilfeather. The reminders were there, but it is not the same.

I suppose there is the line of thought that the three volumes of a trilogy (which is not necessarily a long novel in three parts) should be like three pillars of relatively equal load-bearing strength. Certainly when we come to write the things we usually bear in mind that the reader might be coming in at book two (or read the first part a long time ago) and try to include enough background detail to pick up the storyline. But background detail is hardly the same thing as narrative or thematic structure – the architectural construction, so to speak, of how the three books combine into a three-dimensional whole.

For competitions, having one or two judges who didn’t read the first book might be a valid procedure if the majority of the judges have read it, and if the same procedure is used for all the other novels by other authors being considered.

I admit that when I see a reviewer announcing that he/she ‘didn’t read the previous book, but…’ I get a bit irritated. I appreciate that professional reviewers do have a lot of books thrown their way and deadlines to meet, but it will (almost inevitably) put a limited value on what they have to say because they’re taking it out of context. Or maybe that’s just me being bias, I don’t know. 😛