Spur Awards

I'm serving as a judge in the Spur Awards this year, in the category of Best Novel of the West. This is the same category I helped judge seven or eight years ago. The rule that determines which novels go in which category is purely arbitrary: if it's under 90,000 words, a book is eligible for Best Western; if it's over 90,000 words, it goes in the Best Novel of the West category. I'll be getting a lot of books to read over the next three months or so, and it strikes me as unethical somehow to discuss them while the competition is still going on. So if I'm rather vague about what I'm reading for a while, that's the reason. Of course I'll continue to read and comment on other books, too, and after the Spur competition is over and my nominations have been turned in, I'm sure I'll have some things to say about some of the books I've read in the course of the contest.

By the way, the Spur Awards are given out each year by the Western Writers of America, which I failed to mention above.