Hey all, Sam here.
Yikes, I was supposed to have this up like a week ago. Oops. Though I’ve had a tab open for the blog this whole time, I sadly and honestly haven’t been venturing over here as much as I should. Work has been a little more stressful than usual the past couple of weeks and so when I’m at home I’m just trying to mentally escape and relax…which usually ends up with me binge watching TV and not doing any work on the blog or my stories or anything like that.
Anyway, August was a pretty decent month overall for getting things done….well, mostly. There’s one section below that is definitely lacking, but I’m hoping the rest of the year will be better for that.
Let’s just go ahead and jump right into the rundown of everything I read, wrote, and blogged, as well as what trips and conventions I went on/to.
Reading
When I was putting this section together, I was a little frustrated with myself because it didn’t feel like I did a whole lot of reading in August. I mean seven of my reads were under or right around 300 pages, and sometimes that makes me feel like I’m not doing as much as I could. So I decided to add up the page count for the 11 books I read during the month, and it was 4056 pages, or what amounts to about 130 pages a day.
I don’t know, but looking at my reading progress that way–at least this month–made me feel a little better. Now, I know I didn’t read every single day. Most of the time I probably read 3-4 days a week–and that would be an even better average of 213 or 289 pages per day– and that is actually a pretty good number. Sometimes you just have to look at the stats from a different angle or perspective to truly realize what you’re accomplishing.
Anyway, like I said, I finished eleven whole books during the month of August. Yes, three of those books were volumes of manga, and one was an anthology of some excellent stories. But I still feel pretty good about my reading progress for the year. I’m nicely ahead on my reading goal, and I’ve been looking at my hopeful reading plans for the last few months of 2026 and I’m very excited about the books I’m seeing on that list, which is pretty fun.
Anyway, let’s talk about what I read.
Mighty Nein: Stories Untold by Betsy Aoki, Mae Catt, Dani Carr, Kiri Callighan, Mike Chen, Nadia El-Fassi, Rin Chupeco, Nino Cipri, Chase K, forward by Taliesin Jaffe — 5 stars
Witch Hat Atelier Vol 1 by Kamome Shirahama — 4 stars
I Punched an Alien and Now We’re in Couples Therapy by Kimberly Lemming — 4.5 stars
Manga Classics: Journey to the West – The Beginning by Cheng’en Wu — 4 stars
Manga Classics: Sherlock Holmes Vol 1 A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — 4 stars
How To Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps by Andrew Rowe — 3.5 stars
The Inheritance by Ilona Andrews — 4 stars
Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman narrated by Jeff Hays — 4 stars
The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman narrated by Jeff Hays — 4.5 stars
The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman narrated by Jeff Hays — 4.5 stars
The Butcher’s Masquerade by Matt Dinniman narrated by Jeff Hays — 4.5 stars
Writing
Okay, so for writing this month…I absorbed a lot of knowledge and inspiration at the panels of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium. It was a great time and I took many notes, possibly the most pages of notes I’ve taken for any previous Writer’s Symposium.
Honestly, at this point, I should probably go back and read over those notes and try to harness that inspiration again, because I haven’t done like any writing since Gen Con, and that’s something I really should try to spend more time on. I have a lot of ideas that I need to get on the page, and my characters have been speaking to me. I think it’s about time I listen to them.
Blogging
Honestly, I think that five blog posts isn’t completely terrible for the month. Yes, I would love to be able to keep up with my goal of two blog posts a week, but considering everything else going on, I’m just happy to have some sort of semi-regular posting schedule. I do have like 20 partially completed blog post drafts, so if I can get myself to focus then I should have a whole bunch of posts coming in the hopefully near future.
Manga Review: Witch Hat Atelier, Vol 1 by Kamome Shirahama
A Day on the Iowa Indie Bookshop Tour
What’s My Reading Plan for September 2026?
Trips/Conventions
I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about the trips/conventions here, because I already did full posts on both Gen Con and the Iowa Indie Bookshop Tour (both linked in the Blogging section above), but August was filled with lots of travel and activity. The first photo here is from one of the Writer’s Symposium panels, the second is one of my Gen Con haul photos, featuring the Cartograph solo RPG game and a crochet raven, the third photo is the charcuterie board and sangria flight that David and I shared after enjoying our bookshop tour day, and the fourth photo is my book haul from the day of bookshops.
September should have some fun travel in it as well. We might get to do another day on the Iowa Indie Bookshop Tour, which would be cool, but we are also headed to the Ohio Renaissance Festival, followed by a few days of hiking and relaxation in Hocking Hills as a celebration of our five year wedding anniversary. I had brought it up to David last year that we’d be hitting our five year, and so maybe a cool way to celebrate would be to sort of repeat our honeymoon–hence the Hocking Hills part of the trip. But then I happened to see that Jacques Ze Whipper was going to be at the Ohio Renaissance Festival for two weekends in September 2026, so instead of planning our trip in October, when our actual anniversary is, we decided to celebrate a month early just so we could go see the whippy show in person.
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.
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