Hey all, Sam here.
So….my May wrap-up is coming up so late because I’ve been deep in the trenches of binge-reading. That is absolutely because of the Pride Month reading challenge issued by my co-worker, and I’m not at all complaining about how much I’m reading. It has felt incredible.
But it has meant that I haven’t really been focused on blogging or on creative writing. Oops. I have so many books that I need to talk about, so I’m going to try and sit down to write up a few book reviews over the next few days (maybe put on an audiobook while I’m blogging, so I can accomplish multiple goals at the same time.
Anyway, here we go. Let’s finally get into everything I accomplished in May…well, everything I normally recap in these posts. I guess I could put what I’ve been watching on here, as well as the games I’ve been playing. I’m a multi-faceted geek with many interests.
Reading
May has been my best month for reading in quite a long time (spoiler alert: June will be even better). I did a couple re-reads this month, and two of my reads were audiobooks, which was a really nice time. I pretty much need to write up reviews for just about all of these, so there’s even more posts I’ll need to try and draft up. If I can ever catch up on these reviews then it’ll be a miracle.
Okay, let’s run down all my May reads.
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins narrated by Jefferson White — 5 stars (re-read)
For Whom the Belle Tolls by Jaysea Lynn — 5 stars (re-read)
Bromantasy by Máire Roche — 3.5 stars
I Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire by P.N. Elrod — 4 stars
Date Knight by Sam Parks — 4.5 stars
A Lady for All Seasons by T.J. Alexander — 5 stars
Daemons of the Shadow Realm Vol 1 by Hiromu Arakawa — 4 stars
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman narrated by Jeff Hays — 5 stars
The Entanglement of Rival Wizards by Sara Raasch — 4.5 stars
Rolls and Rivalry by Kristy Boyce — 5 stars
Dungeon Crawler Carl Vol 1 by Matt Dinniman, Aethon, Actus, Laurel Pursuit, and Tevagah — 5 stars
The Fake Divination Offense by Sara Raasch — 4.5 stars
Startup Hell by Caitlin Rozakis — 4 stars
A Forest, Darkly by A.G. Slatter — 4 stars
What Darkness Brings by Jenna Wolfhart — 4.5 stars
Writing
I did do some writing, but my goal for the Writers Atelier Write Brave Challenge got knocked off course because of all of the traveling, both for the funeral and for our planned Ohio vacation. So, I wrote a few thousand words on my book, but then I got a bit distracted by reading and just couldn’t catch myself back up. It’s fine, though. I don’t feel as blocked as I did before all of this.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to accomplish much writing in June because I’m so wrapped up in my reading goals, but I do know that the Pathfinders Writing Collective has their summer writing challenge starting in July, so I’ll probably try and focus on writing in July more instead of reading as much.
Blogging
While I’d love to be writing and posting two blog posts minimum a week, it seems I can only manage around 4-6 posts a month right now…and I guess that’s better than nothing, although I’ll keep hoping and working towards doing more than that. Here’s the links to all of my posts, just in case you missed one and are interested in checking it out.
Weekend Writer: Freewrite Traveler
Trips/Conventions
Our month started with a quick trip to Ohio for a funeral, and then we returned to Ohio about a week later for a scheduled vacation. Then towards the end of the month we decided to go have another getaway to Hannibal, Missouri so we could camp in a tent and unplug for a couple days. So it was a month with a decent amount of extra driving (which was not fun thanks to the increasing cost of gas).
The first photo is the Lower Falls at Old Man’s Cave in Hocking Hills State Park. We took a quick little hiking excursion in the hours before David’s grandpa’s funeral. While we were there for a somber reason, it was still nice to ground ourselves in nature for a little while first. Photos two and three are from our vacation to Ohio, where we visited my mom. One is my Freewrite at one of the bars on Put-In-Bay when we did an island visit for a day, and the other is a nice sunset and campfire from our last night of vacation. It was a nice time. The final photo is our tent set-up from a couple day camping trip in Hannibal, Missouri, where we just hung out and relaxed. We’re going to do it again later in June for David’s birthday.
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.
Free State of Geek 