February Wrap-Up

Hey all, Sam here.

While February is a shorter month, I think I stayed decently productive with my reading, although I did have a couple of reading slumps that meant I only technically read for half the month. That’s fine. I’ll still take what I managed to complete in that time, because it was still a decent number of books.

I’m actually looking over my upcoming releases list for the next few months and oh boy, I have so very many awesome books to look forward to (and there’s quite a few I’ve managed to preorder already.

All right, let’s go ahead and go over all the things I accomplished in the month of February.

Reading

I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming — 5 stars

Boudicca by P.C. Cast — 4.5 stars

House of Frank by Kaye Sinclair — 4.5 stars

In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran — 4 stars

At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran — 4 stars

The Morrigan by Kim Curran — 5 stars

Sistah Samurai by Tatiana Obey — 4 stars

Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis — 4 stars

Good Game, Gamer Girl by Reina Zoric — 3.5 stars

Overall, I think 9 completed books in a month is still pretty darn good, although I had hoped to fit in a few others, but for various reasons it just didn’t happen. Because of that I have just a few currently in progress reads….

I struggled with carving out reading time at many points during the month, so I didn’t get through as much of A Feather So Black by Lyra Selene as I had hoped to. Due to both time and not being as sucked into the story and characters (yet) as her previous series, I am only like 15% into Rain of Shadows and Endings by Melissa K. Roehrich. And I picked up Swordheart by T. Kingfisher at the end of the month to be a quick read, but my mood reading quickly pulled me away to books coming out at the beginning of March that I want to read and review….so hopefully I’ll be able to finish these in-progress reads from February this month.

I’ll probably be picking up the re-release edition of Swordheart on my next bookstore trip, which is next week and I’m pretty excited for it. I might do a book haul post soon because I’ve picked up some fantastic books already this year.

Writing

I did a tiny bit of writing, not nearly as much as I would have liked. But I also decided to sign up for the Pathfinders Writing Collective (PaWriCo) March Madness challenge. All participants are divided into teams (either Team Green or Team Orange) and you log how much time you spend on your project–which could be outlining, writing, editing, etc–and the team with the most time spent by the end of the month wins.

I’m hoping to do some serious work with planning/organizing/plotting my novel and my novella. Honestly I would love to finish drafting the novella next month, so we’ll see what happens.

Blogging

I’d really love to get up to my goal of two posts per week, but so far I have been failing mightily on this goal. Clearly based on my January and February wrap-ups, I have plenty of books to write and post reviews for, so hopefully I can sit down and get a good number of those ready for posting soon.

Trips/Conventions

Gen Con prep is beginning. Badges have gone up for sale, and while they are starting up the housing registration/lottery process, we’ve never done that. I just spend some time looking up hotels within about 20 miles of the convention center and then look for one that has breakfast included and is the best overall price, and that’s what we book. I did buy our tickets for the Critical Role Live Show taking place during Gen Con already, so at the very least we have that to look forward to.

We are also starting to get ready for a little vacation back to Ohio. We’re spending a “weekend” (our weekend, which is technically the middle of the week) with my mom, and at least one day will be spent on Kelley’s Island. David has never been and I think it’ll be really fun. I can’t wait to show him the glacial grooves.

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Not discussed in any of the topics above is anything I watched or played. We did watch quite a few movies and TV shows, and played a good amount of video games. We had a great time watching “Captain America: Brave New World,” and both of us logged a good number of hours playing “Potion Permit.”

All right, well that is all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.