Welcome, welcome, welcome!

Thank you for stopping by our bony little blog!  We're so excited to launch this new outlet for the voices of the Bony Blithe Award!

If you aren't familiar with Bony Blithe and who she is, please visit our fabuloso new website to get the inside scoop on all things Bony and Blithe!

The purpose of this space is to allow our Judges, our shortlisted Authors and our fabulous contributors an outlet. A place to share the stories of how their stories came to be.  We will be featuring guest posts from the 6 nominated authors of 2013 over the next few weeks leading up to the highly anticipated Gun Club & Quilting Bee Award Gala on May 29th - more details?  Oh sure!  See that link right...up...there? Yup, the one that says fabuloso new website?  Click there and you'll get details for the gala too!




We will also be hearing from judges - like this week!  This, the inaugural entry, is a guest post by none other than the infamous Caro Soles.  Caro is the founder of Bloody Words, Canada's biggest mystery convention, which began in 1999.  She is both a writer of many genres, an editor, a teacher and as it would turn out, a talented cinematographer! To learn more about Caro and her many accomplishments, please visit her website too!

Without further ado, I present Ms. Caro Soles!

Judging Bony Blithe 

I have been a judge for many things, including Mr. Leather Toronto. (Don't ask.) Once it was for flash fiction. Once it was for literary stories. Sometimes it has been for unpublished novels. Other times it has been for best mystery novel or best first novel. In all these instances I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to be judging. 

This time it was different. For one thing, being a judge for the Bony Blithe Award gave me the chance to read a much wider sample of the genre than I was expecting. When we discussed this award in the first place, there was some talk of trying to nail down what exactly the criteria might be. I am all against nailing things down! I figured it was what most people say about art: 'I don't know much about it but I know what I like.' I am so glad that we left it fairly open.

Of course there were books set in small villages where everyone knows each other. Of course there were cuddly animals and intelligent cats. There were fascinating details about sewing, antiques, music, even Hamilton! And I was delighted to find a book starring vampires. But the best thing of all about the Bony Blithe books is the level of the writing. Let me confess right now that I rather enjoy the odd bullet-riddled corpse from time to time. But after this experience, I will be looking for more of these wonderful traditional mysteries like the 6 nominees for this year's Bony Blithe Award!