Fantasy Oscars

"There's 104 days of Summer vacation, then school comes along just to end it, so the annual problem for our generation is finding a good way to spend it..."

Gotta love Phineas and Ferb, right?

Last week I told you about the Read to Win challenge, and I hope that some of you are already finding some new fun books to read to try and win that Grand Prize.Today, I am going to tell you a little bit more about this Fantasy Oscars idea I've been hinting at for the past few months. A while back, my friend and fellow author, DJ Edwardson had a brilliant idea for a series of blog posts that would present virtual awards to various fantasy characters or items or mounts that are worthy of being celebrated.However, after thinking about it for a bit, we both concluded that we couldn't think of any award that would NOT be won by someone or something from Tolkien's The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings.So, the idea changed a bit, and we decided that we would hold up The Lord of the Rings as the STANDARD for these awards, and have characters from Tolkien's books presenting the awards. We would call them "The Silmarillion Awards" and the awards themselves would be called "Silmarils."Then we realized that the Lord of the Rings' birthday is on July 29th.And the idea morphed again and we invited 8 other fabulous bloggers to join us for this Silmarillion Awards Blog Tour-style event. So, starting on June 20th, each of us will be opening a different Silmaril for nominations on our blogs. This is where we will need YOUR help in submitting nominations for each of the awards!Then we will compile the nominations and create voting forms. The last two weeks of July, we will present the awards to the winners... and then on July 29th we will just have a huge Lord of the Rings celebration throughout the blog-0-verse.Sound like fun?More details and information will be coming on June 20th, so keep an eye out for that. For now, I wanted to share the list of participating bloggers and the award they will be presenting:

DJ Edwardson — The Best Friend Silmaril

Jenelle Schmidt — The Most Heart-Wrenching Death Scene Silmaril

Deborah O’Carroll@Road of a Writer — The Strangest Character Silmaril

Abbey@Abbey's World of Pure Imagination — The Most Nefarious Villain Silmaril

JL Mbewe — The Best Redemption Story Silmaril

Tracey@Adventure Awaits — The Riddling and Poetry Silmaril

Jack Lewis Baillot — The Best Fantasy Mount Silmaril

Madeline J. Rose — The Most Heroic Character Silmaril

Zachary Totah — The Wisest Counsellor Silmaril

Rawls E. Fantasy — The Best Fantasy Weapon Silmaril

I hope you'll join us in the fun!