I have a book club called The Restricted Section, and these are the 4 books we’re planning to tackle this summer. Interested? You should join!

Hello valiant blog readers!

I have been terrible at keeping this thing updated. I know. Every time I get busy this blog is the first thing to go, but it’s also one of my favorite things I do online! I don’t understand it! I’m gonna be better. I promise.

Anyway! Here’s what I have been up to since the last time I wrote a blog post, which was… early November.

The biggest thing for me was – I finished my 9th NaNoWriMo novel! It was a crazy month, with very little time for anything other than writing, but I DID IT. It felt amazing, and here’s my video documentation of the process if you want to know more about what it was like for me:

I also recently started up a book club on Goodreads if you haven’t heard about that yet. It’s called The Restricted Section and we’ve already got a great group of people involved! Our first book (for November) was Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore (which I loved) and this month we’re reading My True Love Gave to Me, a compilation of holiday themed short stories written by popular YA authors. I can’t wait to dive into it.

As for this month, I’m currently gearing up for Project 4 Awesome (that’s taking place December 12-13 if you wanna get involved) and then shortly after that is the Christmas BookTubeAThon! I can’t WAIT to find out what the challenges are; I love BookTubeAThon so much. I will likely be making daily videos and shoving everything else on my to-do list way down so I can knock out a bunch more reading before the end of the year.

It’s also going to be my birthday soon… I turn 27 on the 27th, making it my golden birthday! This will also set my well into my “late twenties”, which is something I am still grappling with, emotionally. Where did the time go? I honestly couldn’t tell you. I was too busy wearing footy pajamas and watching My Little Pony to notice how old I’ve gotten.

That’s sort of it, for now! I hope you’re all doing well and I will be back very soon with another blog post. Happy December!

2014 has been a great year so far not only for starting new projects, but also for picking up old projects and dusting them off. OneUpMakeup was of course one of these such projects – but the other is Answerly!

Answerly was and has been an advice channel I made weekly videos for, discussing the ins and outs of being a nerd. My co-hosts were Joseph Birdsong and Hayley Hoover, discussing love and college life, respectively. We made two straight years of videos before we decided it was time to give the channel a face lift.

As we rounded the corner to the new year, we relaunched the channel with all new branding as the Answerly Book Club, a place to read books together and talk about them and interact much more than you ever could before with Answerly. Joe’s reading comedy books, Hayley’s tackling books by women, and I will be finding out what’s new and hot in the Young Adult genre.

My first book is Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell and I’m immensely enjoying it. I hope you’ll join us with these first books of the year, and stick around to see what we’ll be reading next!

I am so glad we found a way to take our tired old channel and really breathe some life into it… as well as encouraging ourselves and others to make more time for reading! God knows we all could probably use a bit more reading time.