July Wrap-Up

Hey all, Sam here.

All right, well today we have another post that I had about 95% of the way drafted before leaving for Gen Con. I couldn’t completely finish it until yesterday, just in case I managed to squeeze in a little extra reading or writing time.

Tonight David and I are going to the Critical Role live show, and while we won’t discuss anything spoiler-y, we will probably vaguely talk about the show in our Gen Con wrap-up post. I think we’re both most excited to see how the cast takes their Campaign 3 characters and adapts them over into the Daggerheart system.

Anyway, today’s post isn’t about Gen Con; it’s about everything I managed to get done in the month of July, which just might have been my most productive month of the year, so perhaps I’ll just end the intro here and jump into the real meat of the post. Let’s get into it all:

Reading

Umm…so somehow I ended up having a really great reading month for July. As of July 29th (when I’m writing this up), I was at 20 completed reads for the month, which makes this my most productive reading month of the year…although still not my most productive reading month ever. I know I had a March a few years back where I read 31 books in 31 days, which was incredible.

Anyway, I read a lot of really great stories this month, and I already have reviews up for a few of them, but I have plans for writing up reviews for as many of the others as I can manage (with a slight priority to books that I requested on NetGalley–I’m still trying to work on getting my review percentage up there). I’ll include the links to any posts already up on the blog.

Here we go with the reading wrap-up:

Pathfinder: Before the Godsrain by James L Sutter, James Jacobs, Liane Merciel, Kate Alice Marshall, Owen K.C. Stephens, Michael Sayre, James Case, and Mark Moreland — 4 stars

Soulgazer by Maggie Rapier — 4 stars

Tusk Love by Thea Guanzon — 4 stars

Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons by Jaleigh Johnson — 5 stars

Love is a War Song by Danica Nava — 4 stars

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern — 5 stars

Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories by Charlie Jane Anders — 5 stars

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz — 4.5 stars

The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World by J.R. Dawson — 4 stars

The Apothecary Diaries (Light Novel) Vol 1 by Natsu Hyuuga, Touco Shino (Illustrator), and Kevin Steinbach (Translator) — 4 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 1 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), and Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator) — 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 2 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) — 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 3 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) — 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 4 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) — 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 5 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) — 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 6 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) — 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 7 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) – 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 8 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) — 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 9 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) — 5 stars

Solo Leveling Vol 10 by Chugong, HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), Dubu (Redice Studio) (Illustrator), and J Torres (Translator) — 5 stars

Blogging

I’m actually starting to get a little more consistent with getting posts up, and starting to actually reach my 2025 blogging goal of two posts per week/basically 8 posts per month. That means I definitely hit that goal for the month of July. However, I am still very behind on my book reviews, so I’m hoping to focus more on catching up on those going forward. We’ll see how well I stick to that. Anyway, here’s all the blogs I posted in the month of July:

June Wrap-Up

PaWriCo Bookish Bootcamp June 27-July 3 Check-In

NetGalley Review: Soulgazer by Maggie Rapier

PaWriCo Bookish Bootcamp July 4-10th Check-In

PaWriCo Bookish Bootcamp July 11-17 Check-In

NetGalley Review: The Starlight Heir by Amalie Howard

Books I’m Looking Forward to in August

Gen Con 2025 Schedule

NetGalley Review: Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons by Jaleigh Johnson

NetGalley Review: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Writing

Based on a few of those blog posts, you would think that my writing update would be a good one. While it’s true that I did write a few thousand words towards my D&D novel, most of my writing progress was in plotting, Worldbuilding, character exploration, and basically a bunch of prep work. So…not as much progress as I would have actually liked to have.

But I have quite a few intriguing panels scheduled at the Gen Con Writers Symposium, so I’m hoping I can finally start getting back to a better rhythm and habit when it comes to my creative writing output.

I can definitely say that I do have some Weekend Writer posts in the rough stages of planning. There’s a few writing craft books I’d like to talk about, but I’m also thinking about writing up posts based on the notes I’ve taken at Writers Symposium panels over the last couple of years. Would anyone be interested in that? Let me know in the comments!

Trips/Conventions

As this post goes live, we are at Gen Con, so there will be a Gen Con Wrap-Up post sometime next week. I am hoping to have some update posts going on my Instagram for the convention, so you can probably see some photos there (I’m @SamRushingBooks).

This is honestly one of our biggest trips we plan each year, and we have been looking forward to it for months now. Perhaps I’ll even try to sit down with David and write up a few Tabletop Tuesday posts to talk about some of the tabletop games and accessories we tried out at Gen Con or that we picked up to add to our collection. It’s been a while since we’ve had non-book-related Tabletop Tuesday posts.

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