Mid-Year Notes || Reading, Blogging, Art

As someone who has multiple hobbies, I struggle with managing them all. There is always one that gets lesser attention. But I love having multiple hobbies. It is very satisfying to progress in different things and to have many skills. They also give me more material for whenever I need to introduce myself haha.

It's hard to remember my achievements and document them too. I have many things going on in my head everyday. Since we're in the middle of the year, this time is perfect to look back a little and note milestones. When doing this annually, I tend to forget about the smaller wins but they deserve some celebration too.

So instead of doing a June wrap-up, I wanted to do a mid-year check-in post. This is going to be a casual post about my year so far, what milestones I crossed, and what I look forward to for the rest of 2021.

reading

For the last two years, I had aggressive reading goals. 150 books a year is a LOT, even if I fly through books. I actually reduced it to 100 in 2020 but increased it again after the pandemic began.

Due to those goals, I didn't let myself pick up many long books or books that I will take more time with. For example, non-fiction and literary fiction. This year, I didn't want any pressure on my reading for that reason. I wanted to branch out and take it easy.

I set my goal as 10 books and decided to increase the goal by 10 every time I complete the goal. So it'll go like 10 books then 20 and so on. I stopped increasing after 50 though, haha. Laziness prevailed.

As of now, I've read 75 books this year! I didn't set the goal but I'm still on track to read 150 books in 2021. This shows how much I turned to books for escapism.

I was reading around 3 books a week until the end of May when I went into a reading slump. Thankfully, the slump ended pretty soon. I picked up a romance book after 10 days and slowly worked up to reading more often. I'm still not back at 3 books a week yet but I don't want to be either.

While I love reading, it does take a lot of time which can be spent on other hobbies. Audiobooks help but sometimes I want to listen to music and draw. Or do something else. Being a book blogger/influencer* has tightly tied my identity with reading. If I don't read, I have an identity crisis.** This year, I've come closest to reading stress-free again. And it feels SO GOOD. Highly recommend it.

Most of my books have been romance (because comfort escapism) and many of them have been quality romance. Here are my favourite romance books so far:

• Heidi's Guide to Four Letter Words by Tara Sivec and Andi Arndt (my review)
• Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert. This was SO CUTE and heartwarming. I loved the sunshine-and-grumpy-couple trope and the setting.
• Destiny's Embrace by Beverly Jenkins. Historical romances aren't my scene but this was amazing.
• Drag Me Up by R. M. Virtues. I keep thinking about reviewing this and I back out because I feel like I won't do this justice. It's too good.
• What Are The Odds? by R. M. Virtues. I think I can review this but I need more time haha. This is also very good.
• The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas. Workplaces romances are not my thing but every other part of this was amazing. The tropes, the chemistry, and the plot made me love it.

In between the romances, I did manage to read books from other genres. And I read some GREAT books. Here are my favourites:

• Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko. Absolutely brilliant. Deserves all the hype.
• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. This had me ABSORBED and reminded me why I like literary fiction.
• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. This was everything I expected from the hype and more. I fully annotated my copy and experienced emotions.
• You've Reached Sam by Dustin Thao (my review)
• Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto. This was hilarious and provided me with the escape I needed.
• If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio. I'm so glad I finally read this. It was great and I loved that it had things to analyze. I spent quite a while thinking about every part of this book after I finished it.

Not all my reading has been great this year, but it was better than average. And I'll take what I can get. As for the rest of the year, I don't have a set TBR (as usual) so let's see where my mood takes me.

*in general, my identity is tied to books even though I blog about other things too.

**I know I'm not alone in this because I've seen other book influencers talk about this in passing. I want to write a discussion on this but I haven't figured out how to make it coherent yet lol.

blogging

I welcomed 2021 with a blogging slump. I wasn't liking the look of my blog or the direction I was going in. It put me into a slump in October and I was trying very hard to blog regularly.

When the new year came, I reflected and journaled a lot. It made me realize that I wanted to start anew with my blog. Just the thought of a fresh start made me more excited about blogging.

After a ton of internal debates and a couple of pros-and-cons lists, I bought a domain and gave my blog a new home. And I'm so glad I did it despite my hesitations. Starting over with this blog has brought back my love for blogging. I especially love that every part of the blog is mine, including the images. I know that I haven't spoken about it much* but going self-hosted has been one of my best decisions.

I was unsure of moving to a new domain and building credibility again, but I shouldn't have worried. It's been a little over four months since I started this blog and it has grown so much. In some areas, more than my previous blog which I had for years.

Allow me to brag a little and celebrate my accomplishments because I'm pretty proud of myself. Here are the milestones this blog has crossed in the last few months:

• hit 2.5k blog followers
• launched my newsletter and reached 100 subscribers
• set up a resource library
• the blog's domain authority is now 14 (more than my last blog's!)
• got my first sponsored blog post opportunity!
• multiple posts rank on the first page of google
• 40 posts (note: I launched the blog with a bunch of blog posts up)
• and this month, I'll mostly reach 7k views!

On my old blog, I managed to reach 5k views a month only after years and a TON of posts. The fact that this blog is doing so well makes me very happy, and is the sign that I'm doing things well.

One of my goals was to post less frequently but post only high-quality posts i.e. ones that I'm fully satisfied with. I wanted to post about once a week. This is the first month that I posted only four times, and didn't succumb to the pressure to post more. And this is the best month I've had so far.** That's amazing news.

I'm very happy about the look of this blog and the content that I'm putting out. Each post makes me proud. And the engagement has been significantly more as well, so that's reassuring.

Looking forward, I don't have any specific plans. I'm going to continue posting what I like and continue with the newsletter. The resource library is definitely going to grow a lot in the next few months. I'll need to figure out a new layout so it doesn't become a long page to scroll haha.

*mainly because I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested. If you'd like me to make a post on my experience of going self-hosted + advice/tips, let me know in the comments!

**it is partly because of previous posts that are getting traffic through search engines.

Related post: My Blogging Journey // Experiences, Trials, & Regrets

art

In the later months of 2020, I started digital drawing. My mom got a drawing pad and stopped using it after a couple days, so I tried it out. Since then, I've been hooked onto making art again.

I am an artsy person in general. I used to sketch and paint when I was younger but it stopped when I reached 10th grade. The Indian academic system pressured me and took all of my time. I discovered blogging in 12th grade and have devoted my free time to this since then.

So art got sidelined until I graduated from college. Digital drawing has rekindled my love for art and I've been enjoying the process a lot. I started with a drawing pad and Krita (a drawing software). Krita was a completely new thing to me and it took me a while to get used to it. I still don't know how to use all of its features. It has a LOT.

But I was annoyed that it wasn't very easy to use. It involved me having to set it up with my laptop every time, and requiring a proper space for it. I like to be flexible and draw in different positions. So after a lot of thought, and convincing myself that I deserve it, I splurged on an iPad!

While I use it for multiple things, I got it mainly for drawing and using Procreate. And I'm loving it! I've been drawing more often now because using Procreate on iPad is much easier than using Krita with the drawing pad. If you'd like to see all my art in one place, check out my Instagram! I turned it from a dead bookstagram to a random art account.

If you go back to when I started sharing my art, you can clearly see how far I've come in the past few months. It makes me really happy to see the progress as well. While I'm trying to keep the art for this blog on a cosy theme*, I am trying other styles and drawings too.

Some of my best work is available in the resource library for you to use as wallpapers. I'm especially proud of the latest addition which is a cosy tea party themed wallpaper using repeated patterns (that I learnt to make recently).

To top things off, an event occurred which gave me reassurance and encouragement about my art. I got my first ever art commission! I haven't announced that I'm taking illustration commissions even though I've mentioned it on my work with me page. Simply because I'm still a newbie and there are artists who are much better than me. I'm still learning and trying new things.

But a very lovely person reached out and enquired about commissioning me and I was honoured. I spent longer on that commission than on any other art project yet and I'm actually quite proud of how it turned out. It was also a whole new experience which I learnt from.

Looking forward to the rest of the year, I want to continue making art and enjoy it. I want to spend time learning new styles and experimenting too. If the opportunity comes up, I'd love to take a few more commissions as well? Let's see if anyone's interested haha.

*have to say, it's much easier to maintain a proper blog look when I can fully control the images too lol.

endnotes

Despite this year not being great in many aspects, at least my hobbies are going pretty good! I'm mainly trying to lose myself in passion projects so that I won't have enough time to think lol.

I've always wanted to be someone who is good at multiple things and this is the first time that I feel like I can proudly say it because I've spent enough time on each hobby.

It's a huge satisfaction to have enough to say about myself other than my career. I have conversations with my friends where they say that they also want to have other things to do like me. But even creative pursuits take time and effort which is harder than bingeing or gaming. One has to take our time for it and spend time becoming good at another thing. I made it my priority because the results are worth it, and I'm very glad about it.

So if you want to pick up a hobby but haven't worked up to it yet, please do! Find the motivation somehow. DM me for encouragement if you need it. If you're not finding satisfaction in anything right now, start that hobby! You'll love it. It'll be worth it.

be wordy with me!

Do you have multiple hobbies? If yes, what are they and how do you manage them? Do you love having them?

If not, would you like to? Is there any hobby that you'd like to pick up? Is there anything that you've picked up recently?