Hey all, Sam here.
All right, here we go….July is already off to a better start than June (because this is my second blog post of the month, and I only had two posts in all of last month). It was a wild and packed month, though, and there is a lot to cover in this wrap-up, even though almost the entire wrap-up is just one section. Well, like 80% one section, 10% another section, and then the other two sections are just 5% each. It was not a balanced month of activity. Oh well, that happens sometimes.
June was also a month where I started it all off with my third cold of the year. I don’t know what it is about this year, but I just keep catching common colds. They’re annoying. I think it’s because I have so many co-workers who don’t do any sort of courtesy like wearing masks, covering their face when they cough or sneeze, and then not sanitizing commonly used desk spaces or items when they’re sick. Actually, having talked to most of these co-workers, many don’t even take any cold medicine or anything else either. And summer colds somehow hit worse than standard “cold season” colds, so the first handful of the days were spent not doing much reading or anything else.
The month definitely got better after that. This might be my best month of the year to talk about, and that’s exciting. For now, anyway. I’m hoping for this level of productivity but more well divided among my wrap-up categories going forward. You’ll have to just stick around if you want to see if I’m successful or not.
Okay, let’s go ahead and talk about my reading, writing, blogging, and trips/conventions for the month of June. It’s wrap-up time!
Reading
It was a really good reading month. Honestly it reminded me of most of my reading months back in like 2019-2021 or so, when I was averaging like 15-20 books each and every month. This boost at the end of the first half of the year is certainly going to make my Top Ten Reads of 2026 (January-June Edition) post rather interesting. Hopefully I’ll have that post up in a few more days.
Like in Love With You by Emma R. Alban — 4.5 stars
The Impossible Garden of Clara Thorne by Summer N. England — 4 stars
Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban — 4.5 stars
The Hearth Witch’s Guide to Magic & Murder by Kiri Callaghan — 4.5 stars
This Will Be Fun by E.B. Asher — 4 stars
Malice by Heather Walter — 4 stars
She’s a Keeper by Ali K. Mulford — 4.5 stars
Easy Tiger by Ali K. Mulford — 4.5 stars
Party Animal by Ali K. Mulford — 4.5 stars
Crocodile Tears by Ali K. Mulford — 4.5 stars
Hold Your Horses by Ali K. Mulford — 5 stars
Mead Cute by Sam Parks — 4.5 stars
Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous by Autumn K. England — 5 stars
A Gentleman’s Gentleman by T.J. Alexander — 4.5 stars
The High Mountain Court by A.K. Mulford — 4 stars
The Witch of Crimson Arrows by A.K. Mulford — 4 stars
The Witch Apothecary by A.K. Mulford — 5 stars
The Gilded Crown by Marianne Gordon — 4 stars
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers — 5 stars
The Witch’s Blade by A.K. Mulford — 4 stars
The Witchslayer by A.K. Mulford — 4.5 stars
Cauldrons & Campfires by Ali K. Mulford and K. Elle Morrison — 4 stars
The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher — 5 stars
So, clearly, I definitely went on an Ali K Mulford/A.K. Mulford binge read. It turned out their books were easily binge-able, which was awesome for a reading challenge. Honestly, overall, there were a lot of really good reads this month, and I really enjoyed the experience. There’s a few of these where I still need to read the sequel or the last couple books in a series, so hopefully I’ll be reading the rest of those fairly soon. I want to try and be a bit better about completing series.
Writing
Ummm…..I dropped the ball on writing in June because I was so focused on reading, but that’s okay. I plan to focus a bit more on writing in July, thanks to the PaWriCo Bookish Bootcamp, and the fact that it is almost time for Gen Con and the Writers Symposium. In June I perhaps wrote a few hundred words of fiction, which isn’t an incredible number by any stretch of the imagination, but it is more than nothing.
I have a whole bunch of scenes and ideas in my head that I want to get written down, so I’m hoping it will make for a productive writing month in July. If you want to hear more about my goals for the PaWriCo Bookish Bootcamp, it is the post before this one, uploaded on July 1st, so you can check it out.
Blogging
My blogging was a little lax in June. Part of it was the heat, part of it was trip planning, part of it was just lack of focus and planning. Obviously most of it was that I was focusing so much on reading. At this point I am just really disappointed in myself about how many book reviews I haven’t written lately. Clearly I’ve been reading plenty of books.
I’m going to try to focus my time and energy a little better in July. I definitely won’t be able to catch up on my overdue book reviews, but maybe I can start catching up a little bit.
Trips/Conventions
We’re just a few weeks out from Gen Con, which is very exciting. We have our badges ordered, and our event tickets, our hotel has been booked, and our time off has been approved at work. So, now, we wait. I’ll have a Gen Con schedule post up probably mid-July. I have a few TTRPG sessions, but as per usual, most of my events are at the Writers Symposium. I’m looking forward to that.
We also got our tickets for a trip to the Ohio Renaissance Festival towards the end of September. We haven’t been able to make it there since we moved to Iowa, and we really miss our big, awesome faire. We also decided to just go ahead and make a week of it, and booked a cabin for a few nights as an early celebration of our five-year anniversary (five years married, that is). So we’re returning to the area of our honeymoon and going to enjoy some cabin, hiking, and hot tub time in Hocking Hills. That honestly is the last of our big trips for this year. Anything else will be smaller overnight or “weekend” trips.
As for trips this month, we went down to Hannibal and camped in our tent for a couple of days for David’s birthday. Aside from a bad storm in the middle of the night on our last night there (that caused us to have to leave the tent and tear down our canopy because it had been blown over), we had a very lovely time. Since I already posted a campsite photo last month and we didn’t change our setup, I’m instead sharing some food and drink photos: first the fish and chips from the Ole Wolfhound Pub (probably our favorite place to get fish and chips) as well as a couple cocktails from the pub, and then our breakfast from Java Jive (an awesome and eclectic cafe that I really enjoy). Other than that we had meals that were cooked over the campfire: brats and hamburgers with foil packet potatoes on the side. It was all delicious.
Well, that’s all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
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