Hey all, Sam and David here with you for today.
We have reached Wednesday again already. Wow. Well, welcome back to our weekly series that we like to call WIP Wednesday, where we share everything we’ve been up to in the last week. This includes reading, watching, writing, playing, creating….whatever. It’s a nice way to keep track of everything we’ve been up to, because some weeks we’re up to quite a bit.
Feel free to let us know what you’ve been up to lately in the comments, because we would love to know. And to follow along with all of our geeky shenanigans, you can find us at Free State of Geek on Facebook, or @FreeStateofGeek and @SamRushingBooks on Twitter and Instagram.
Sam
Reading: Okay, so I’m technically in the middle of several books right now, and I might be able to finish one or two today, but I don’t know…so I’m just going to go ahead and toss them up here, so I have something to talk about for the reading section. The Warden by Daniel M. Ford, Dragonfall by L.R. Lam, Court of the Undying Seasons by A.M. Strickland, and The Lost War by Justin Lee Anderson.
This is the time of year that I really start to dive into fantasy. But it’s also the time of year where I want to read romantasy and contemporary romance and all that. So I go a little all over the place when it comes to reading.
And I have some pretty big plans for this weekend. I know I’ve mentioned it a couple times already, but I’m going to talk about it again. Every year for the Memorial Day long weekend, David and I made the trip to visit his grandparents in the Hocking Hills region of Ohio. It is a beautiful place, holds a local festival that weekend, and best of all…has really terrible cell phone and internet reception. (Well, at least until David’s aunt bought Wi-Fi for the grandparents). It was always such a nice disconnect from the world, and I usually got quite a bit of reading done, since I couldn’t mindlessly scroll through social media constantly.
This year we sadly cannot make it back to Ohio due to David’s work schedule…so my plan is to mostly disconnect myself at home. I can watch a show or a movie with David when he’s not at work (but he’s probably going to play more “Tears of the Kingdom,” so that shouldn’t be a problem. While David is at work, I can only use the TV to put on some music or a crackling fireplace or whatever. And I’m only allowing myself to jump on social media occasionally to post a reading update. Other than that, May 26-29 I’m going to disconnect and read as much as I can.
I have a pretty decent amount of books selected for a possible TBR, ranging from romances of varying sub-genres to fantasy and paranormal…and a good number of them are also books I need to read and review to help my NetGalley review percentage.
So, if you want to follow along, or if you’d like to join in, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter @SamRushingBooks.
Watching: “Arrow” Season 8, “Shadowhunters” Season 1 and Season 2 (in progress), “The Marvelous Mrs Maisel” Season 5 (in progress), “Critical Role” Campaign 3 (in progress), “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” and a whole bunch of BookTube videos.
I have finally finished watching “Arrow.” When it was airing, I got busy and stopped watching after Season 5, so it was nice to go back and complete the show. Now I just need to do the same with “The Flash,” and I already know that I’m going to need to go through the rest of the DCTV shows at some point as well.
I’m also going to be really happy to complete “The Marvelous Mrs Maisel,” which will be airing its final episode in a couple days. Season 4 was just okay, and most of Season 5 has been a drag, but I wanted to see the show through to the end.
“Critical Role” campaign 3 finally switched to the other half of the party (two months ago an event happened that split the party in two and they ended up basically on opposite sides of the world, and we were following just the one group until now). It is so nice to have the other group, and they have really interesting guest stars joining them at the table, but I’m also really looking forward to all of Bells Hells being together again.
And I realized that I was basically a year behind on most of the BookTubers I follow, so I am doing a binge-watch of Regan at PeruseProject’s videos from the past year. It’s really making me think more about getting the Free State of Geek channel up and running, but we’ll see what happens.
Writing: I’ve done a little bit of writing on a few different projects, and apparently I’m having focus problems because I keep bouncing between projects. I saw a post on Fantasy Book Addict’s Facebook, and it was basically a story idea about a woman who decides to become a vampire so she can have the time to read all the books on her TBR. Honestly, the idea of a cozy paranormal/fantasy following a woman who just wants to read books and find the perfect places to visit for peak bookish aesthetics sounds pretty fun to me…so I’ve started trying to figure out that story.
But I’ve also done some more writing for my Weekend Writer prompts posts, and I’ve at least thought about Roll for Romance, Tale of Blood and Mourning, and the Project Death books. I really need to buckle down and focus on actually getting the words on the page for these. I was doing so well in April thanks to Camp NaNoWriMo, and then I hit my word count goal and decided to slack off after that.
Other: We went to the Renaissance Faire at Sleepy Hollow in Des Moines, Iowa, last weekend, and it was a fairly decent experience. Apparently this faire is only like five years old, so they still have a lot of stuff they need to get figured out, but there’s hope for the future. I’m hoping we’ll be able to go to the Iowa Renaissance Festival in Amana, Iowa, which has apparently been going for 31 years now.
We can say that the mead selection at Sleepy Hollow was fantastic. And it was really nice to dress up in garb again. It’s been sad to have all of that just hanging in the closet, being ignored. I was able to dress up as one of my favorite D&D characters. Our old group had this tradition of dressing up like the character we were playing for whatever session was closest to Halloween, and since we divided our time between two different campaigns, the one always ended up having the dress up session. So last year we were supposed to dress as our other character…which for me meant dressing up like Mercy, my aasimar grave cleric of the Morrigan. But David and I moved and the group basically fell apart (and then they decided to kick David and I out at the beginning of this year).
Anyway, as for other activities for the other category…we’ve been doing more 3D printing. We’re teaming up with our friend from Senpai’s Treasure Trove to do the local Downtown Summer Market, and the first day is coming in two weeks, so we’re trying to stock up as much as we can so we can sell some fun figures. I’ll let David share photos of some of the work though.
Oh, and when we got back from Sleepy Hollow, our friends wanted to play more Pathfinder 2E, so we had another session, and it was pretty fun. Honestly it was rather intense. I think we only have one more session to finish the Beginner Box adventure, so we’ll be talking about that soon. And we just bought the booklet that has some adventures set in the same area that can act as a continuation, because we all are having such a great time that we want to keep playing. That booklet arrived today, so David will be able to prep himself up for further adventures with our delightfully chaotic oddballs.
David
Well, that is all from us for today. Thank you so much for stopping by. Let us know what you’ve been up to recently, because we’d love to hear all about it. We’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
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