Hey all, Sam here.
Well…. we are well over a week into February and I’m just now getting this post up. I had it mostly written and it should have been up around February 2nd or 3rd, but I definitely dropped the ball, and the only excuse I have is that the US is a mess right now and I’m just trying to figure out how to survive and do what I can to fight back against it all.
I still tried to make January a productive month, and I did okay with that. I did escape into more than a few books, but unlike last year, work was actually fairly busy in January, so I didn’t have as much free time for reading as I had hoped for (and February is looking to be the same). That’s unfortunate. January and February of 2024 were some of my best reading months.
Anyway, I have a few different things to talk about, so let’s just go ahead and jump on into the monthly wrap-up…
Reading
I think I had a pretty decent reading month in January…not quite on par with last January, but still good overall. Where I failed was getting reviews written up for the books I read during the month, so I’ll be trying to get those written up sometime fairly soon.
Anyway, let’s go ahead and quickly go through everything I read and what I rated them.
Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire — 4.5 stars
The Starlight Heir by Amalie Howard — 5 stars
Dating and Dragons by Kristy Boyce — 4 stars
North is the Night by Emily Rath — 5 stars
Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis — 3 stars
My Friend Anne Frank: The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds by Hannah Pick-Goslar — 5 stars
The Bakery Dragon by Devin Elle Kurtz — 5 stars
Roll for Romance by Lenora Woods — 4.5 stars
Tavern Tale by Kristina W Kelly — 4.5 stars
Casket Case by Lauren Evans — 2.5 stars
Level: Unknown by David Dalglish — 4 stars
The Last Raven by Helen Glynn Jones — DNF @ 15%
Blogging
My goal was a minimum two blog posts per week….and I have not done that at all. I have plenty of books to review (clearly, based on my reading update), but I just stare at the computer screen when it’s time to write up the review portion. I’ll try for better in February.
Writing
I’ve thought about my stories. I did a little bit of writing on the novella, but not nearly as much as I had hoped. And David and I talked about the novel a little bit. But that’s all. I really need to figure out how to not let the stress of what is happening in the US interfere with my ability to create, but that feels extremely difficult considering everything that is going on in the US.
Conventions/Trips
We haven’t done any trips yet this year, but we usually try to stay a little closer to home in winter, because it’s stressful to potentially travel when the weather might be bad. I wouldn’t imagine there’d be much of an update in this section until maybe March/April, but we’ll see. There will definitely be something in May, because the trip to visit my mom in Ohio is already booked.
I guess that’s all for the January Wrap-Up. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll hopefully be back soon with more geeky content.
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