July has been a decent month, with some pleasant and unpleasant surprises along the way. Let’s have a closer look…

I’ll start with the thing that is frustrating me a fair bit. For reasons I have yet to uncover, there’s some issue with posting photos – everything seems to work fine on the site where I have them, the links work when I try them in the browser, but when I paste them in the blog post, it doesn’t seem to work on my PC – but it works when I open the blog post on my phone. So I guess it might be related to some particular browser or add-on settings. I’ll try to test things out more and see what happens.

For that, if you’re a regular reader and the photos didn’t load for you in my post early in July for the June hiking summary, I’d welcome if you let me know.

Speaking of photos gets me to hiking: It wasn’t as active as some other months, but it was still a success. I went on three hikes, which is my default goal. Despite the long days, they were all quite close to home, for reasons I’ll cover in a separate post as usual. For now, though, I’ll share that I finally reached one of my long-term milestones: doing a 40 km hike, beating my previous best of 38,5 km. Surprisingly enough, for someone like me who tends to plan such things, this ended up being quite a spontaneous “day before” decision as things aligned.

I also made some nice progress on my reading goals. I’ve started reading a 6-book series, of which I’m at the end of book two, and it’s been a fast read, so I’m progressing along nicely. I posted a review of the first book already, and the second should follow soon. I also picked up a beta read after a long time, though I’m just through the first two chapters there as I started at the very end of the month.

When it comes to writing, I managed a couple of minor edits and had some ideas to try when it comes to smoothing out some of the rough edges, but they’ll need me to be careful not to end up repeating myself, so I’m figuring out how to take care of some issues I’m seeing. Given how many minor changes I’ve made in the last couple of months, I sometimes end up having ideas that were a better fit for the previous version, or to improve a bit of dialogue only to realize I cut it in the previous rounds of edits, and that can be quite frustrating.

My life’s also been calming down a bit after the busy period at work in the spring, so that’s a plus, and I hope it’ll let me find a better balance of my hobbies – so far, the first positive is reading more again. But I’m hoping for a positive impact in other areas, as long as the weather cooperates, because I find it hard to focus on more challenging things, including writing, if it’s too hot.

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So, that’s it for now. I hope you’ve been doing fine this summer so far – no easy thing if you’re in Europe given the constant heatwaves – and August will be a good time. I have some plans for the month that I won’t spoil just yet, so you’ll have to wait and see.