For my personal review rubrics, I started with slightly modified versions of the rubrics provided for TheBlossomCommunity_'s Blossom Awards 2024, and I've tweaked them a few times since then. I've also grown and learned throughout this process, so my mindset and scoring have changed slightly as well. But for obvious reasons (as in, I don't want this to take another year), I'm not going back to rescore everything. I don't think the change has been too drastic, and scanning my past reviews, I think the scores are still representative of what I would do now, with maybe a point or two difference.

I would like to note that prior to doing all this, I really had no experience critiquing work by non-US authors, so that part, in particular, has been a huge learning curve for me. There are cultural things I didn't understand, grammatical rules I didn't realize were specific to US English only, words that have different uses in other cultures, and the list goes on. As I already said, I'm not going back to rescore everything, but I try to go back through my reviews when I learn new things to fix/update any grammatical/cultural errors, and I'm actually planning on rereading and editing every single one next year. So, if anybody ever sees something offensive or wrong in any of my feedback, please let me know, and I will change it.

In general, if there's anything I did wrong, or something you disagree with, just let me know. I'm human, so I make mistakes, and I am providing a service, so I want to make that service the best quality possible. I had one book where I'd flipped the genre and subgenre around without realizing it, which negatively impacted the score. The author pointed it out, and I fixed it.

And, of course, at the end of the day, this is all my opinion. I firmly believe the author should always get the final say where their story is concerned. So, take it or leave it, as you like.

If you need a refresher on my current rubrics, check out the "Rubrics" chapter of In My Opinion. Of course, when I'm judging, I use whatever rubric the host provides. Those are usually in the original awards books for reference, but I also post them within the review chapters in my book. And I won't repost individual reviews in this book, because that would be ridiculous, but I'll drop the links to the reviews in the in-line comments for each book on the participants lists.

*****

12/29/2024: Weird, huh? Reviews before results? Well, I never claimed to be normal. And I will definitely update my personal rubrics in the future, but that's a topic for another day. Tomorrow...how about we get into the categories as we creep closer to those participants lists? 😊

*****

Addendum: It occurred to me that I probably should have posted the next chapter before this one. You'll see why tomorrow. Oh, well! 😅