masterghandalfWell, everyone, I’d like to take a moment to give a hearty thank you to everyone who responded to my little poll – I really do appreciate it! And now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for (or not) – the results (mostly compiling votes from the comments here, plus a couple on Discord)!
Part I: For this question, I think we saw a pretty good spread of interest, actually, but we did end up with a clear winner pulling ahead – Five Warrior Angels by Brian Lee Durfee, with 5.5 votes (a few of you were split between two options, so I’m counting that as half a vote for each of said options). For our other options, we had 4 for the Dreamers, 4 for Arts of Dark and Light, 2.5 for Kingkiller, and 1 for Destinies of Blood and Stone!
Part II: For this one, we only had two options and voting was very close, with RoP initially in the lead, and then Mithgar gradually catching up until they were actually tied for a while; however, Mithgar ended up winning out, with 10 total votes! RoP still got a lot of interest, however, coming in at second place with a respectable 7 votes!
So, where does that leave us going forward? Per my current schedule, we should be wrapping up both Scrolls of the Ancients and Fellowship of the King in December, leaving us ready to move on to something else for the new year, appropriately enough. So, my current plan will be to begin The Forgetting Moon, first volume of Five Warrior Angels, then and then the Iron Tower omnibus shortly after, alternating on Mondays (while still doing Embers on Fridays, because I think we need to stay on that weekly to have any hope of finishing in a reasonable time😉). In terms of my sporkings of Tolkien derivatives, because the voting was pretty passionate on both sides and because I wanted to do both options, and hopefully as a way to help avoid burnout for both myself and all of you, I think I’m actually going to do Iron Tower, then Season One of Rings of Power, then Silver Call, then Season Two of RoP. So no matter which of those you voted for, you should have something to look forward to in the foreseeable future! For my potential fantasy sporks other than Five Warrior Angels, I’ll also be keeping them in the back of my mind as well and may do something with them someday. I also do intend to do one-post reviews of each of the Destinies of Blood and Stone books (which I’ll plan to post here, on Das_Sporking, and on Anti-Shurtugal) so we can all see how that series… well, not so much ends as just sort of stops. I’ll try to get all three of these done next year, though I can’t promise the exact timetable.
I’d like to extend a heartfelt thanks again to everyone who voted – seriously, hearing from all of you guys makes slogging through bad (or at least frustrating) fiction worth it, and I want you all to know I really appreciate you! On a semi-related note, I’ve also been wanting to try and get back in the groove of writing some of my own stuff (mostly fantasy); if I posted some about it here, would anyone be interested in that? In any case, thanks again, and I hope everyone who’s interested will follow along with my new projects in the coming year. See you then!