Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

Very cool.  RYO is short for Roll-Your-Own which is our multi-theme reading challenge.  The way it works is you look at the available themes, 35 different ones right now, and if you find one you like you join that challenge.  If you don't like any existing challenges or just have an idea you want to try, then you roll-your-own challenge where you determine the theme and the rules.

In your case, you simply create a RYO that is built around the Masterworks list.  In your description you tell everyone the rules and link over to your blog etc.  You can create your own banner for the challenge or I can help you make one.  Your club members can use the banner on their blogs and link over to the challenge page were everyone can see how everyone else is doing.  Every month you let folks know what the next book is in the forum and they'll go tag that book as "currently reading" and it will show on the shelf with a faded cover.  When you're done with that book they tag it as completed and it shows full color.

You can add up to 4 different reading levels but for this one it's open ended so you may want to bypass that option.  There are 144 Masterworks so far which is a bit too much to put in there all at once so I would recommend you just set the challenge to 12 for now.  When you get close to completing 12 books you can update the challenge requirements to 24 to get a second row to start filling in for year 2.  That will keep the challenge page from getting ridiculously long with all those blanks.

Of course, you could just do yearly challenges for 12 books at a time so that the 2015 SF Masterworks Reading Challenge is the first 12 books in order.  The 2016 SFMRC would be for the second dozen in order and so on.  That might be a little less daunting for folks that look at 12 books a year rather than 144, a gross amount of books to some.

Take a look at the RYO page for more details and to get familiar with how other folks have structured their challenges.  If you like we can have a Skype call and talk about it if you want more clarification on anything.  I'm rather excited by the prospect of a club using the RYO to track their progress so I can't wait to see how it works out.  It might give us some ideas for improving the RYO overall.