Hello everybody! If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’d know that I tried doing monthly wrap ups for a few months but decided to abandon them and instead do a monthly spotlight post.

Well, it comes down to this. The monthly spotlight post wasn’t exactly a hit like I thought it’d be – and to be honest, I didn’t like it much either.

So. I decided that I’d go back and start writing monthly wrap up posts. Now that I actually have a posting schedule (book review every Wednesday, random stuff Monday and Friday) instead of posting randomly whenever I feel like posting, these wrap ups should be relatively easier to write.

Anyway, this introduction is longer than I originally intended it to be so lets just begin!

Books Read:

Zara Zyon and a Maelstrom of Secrets // 4.5 Stars – Review HERE

Strange the Dreamer // 4.5 Stars – Review coming soon

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue // 4.5 (or 5) Stars – Review coming soon

Daughter of the Pirate King // 4 Stars – Review listed below

I Believe in a Thing Called Love // 4.5 Stars – Review coming soon

Books Reviewed:

Daughter of the Pirate King

The Bane Chronicles

When Dimple Met Rishi

Tags & Awards:

The Sunshine Blogger Award #2

Fight Like A YA Girl Book Tag

Btw: this quickly became one of my most popular posts ever!

The Summer Book Tag

777 Challenge (or, snippets from my wip)

Discussions:

Why We Need Less Romance and More Friendships in YA

Writing:

I’m Writing a Book (Yes, an actual book that I plan on getting published one day)

Beautiful People – Author Writing Process

Miscellaneous:

Down the TBR Hole #12

10 Authors Whom I Claim Are Favorites But Haven’t Read All Their Books Yet

This also became one of my most-read posts!

What Makes a Good BookTube Channel // & Some Favorite Channels of Mine

What Makes a Good Book Blog // & Some Favorite Blogs of Mine

Now that I got all the posts I wrote this month out of the way, lets move onto the things I did this month!

My Birthday:

My birthday was in July! I turned 17 (whoa – one more year and I’m officially an adult *faints*).

A few days before my birthday, my sister told me that she had some stuff planned for us that day. So we hopped in the car and she started driving me to a mysterious place. We ended up picking up two friends of ours and then headed to another mysterious place.

That mysterious place ended up being a Japanese store! Okay, so this was very exciting because it was filled with Japanese beauty products, decor, and snacks! I ended up stocking up on Pocky, then found some new snacks as well like these wafer square things (omg they were amazing), these chewy coffee candies (I actually still have some!), and I got myself two of those Japanese sodas (can’t for the life of me remember the brand).

I also got myself a pair of chopsticks (they’re blue and have owls on them!!) and some decorative tape for my journal and these little panda page flags!

After that, we went to a Boba place to get some Boba tea! I hadn’t had Boba tea for YEARS and if I’m being completely honest I didn’t like it when I tried it then, but I was surprised this time around because I actually enjoyed it! My jaw hurt after a while from chewing the Boba but aside from that it was really good.

After that we went to this fancy outdoor shopping place but the only shop we wanted to visit (the others were crazy expensive) was Barnes and Noble, but after walking around we realized that the Barnes and Noble there hadn’t even been built yet!

That was a bummer, but we started getting hungry so on the way back to our friend’s house we found this cool sushi place and ate there. The sushi was SO GOOD and it was actually my first time getting sushi at a sushi restaurant instead of just a grocery store.

My sister and I had made a cake the day before my birthday called Kekstorta (it’s Serbian and is the most delicious cake ever) and it had to be in the fridge before we could eat it (which is why we made it the day before) so we saved the cake for later.

But anyways, on my birthday my family took me to Barnes and Noble and I SPLURGED! The only books (besides e-books from NetGalley, but I’ll talk about that later) that I got in July were during this trip haha. After that, my dad wanted to get me a PS4 so we went to GameStop and got me a used one (way cheaper than new) and a few games.

I also might’ve splurged at GameStop and got myself four pop figures oops.

It was buy three get one free, don’t judge!

I also had gotten a Luna Lovegood pop at B&N

After that, we picked up Chinese food from this amazing Chinese place and brought it home where we watched The Walking Dead.

Camp NaNoWriMo:

I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo this month again! I began the month with about 22,000 words written in my book and my goal was to make it to 50,000.

Well, I didn’t make that goal.

BUT. I got really close!

My book as of the last day of Camp NaNo rests at 45,633 words and I think I did pretty dang good!

Also, I might’ve fallen in love with my book and characters even more than I already was which I didn’t think was possible!

That’s basically the main things I’ve done this month. Yeah, not all that interesting, but oh well! Here are things I’ve been watching, my blogging stats, etc.!

What I Watched:

My family has been bingeing The Walking Dead like crazy this month! My sister and dad have been fans of the show for years now, but my mom has always refused to watch it, but we kind of forced her and she actually likes it now! We started the month on season 4 and now we’re on season 7!

Can we just talk about Negan for a sec?

John Winchester reincarnated even worse than before.

I’ve also started two new K-Dramas in July! Netflix added Reply 1997 which I was so excited about because it’s one of the most beloved K-Dramas of all time and I completely understand why! I watched most of it in one weekend! But I do have two episodes left… I’ve been holding it off for weeks haha.

The other drama I started watching is Descendants of the Sun with Flavia from Flavia the Bibliophile and we’re both loving it so far! She’s ahead of me by a few episodes though because I just haven’t had the time to watch it lately.

Blog:

Usually I don’t care about this stuff but my blog has grown a lot this month! I’m almost at 400 followers (when at the beginning of the month I was barely over 300) and my blog has 1.4k views this month!

Aside from that, I’d also like to maybe try and make it to 500 followers by the end of August… if that’s possible?? I don’t want to set goals because stats and followers aren’t everything, but seeing how close I made it to 400 this month made me believe I could do it, and now I have a schedule so… 500 is my goal!

BookTube:

My BookTube channel has kind of been on the back burner this month. So. I filmed two reviews but my sister and I both use the same camera so the camera basically just kept on running out of space and only filmed around one minute of my videos.

Thus, once we got separate sim cards to use, I lost my motivation to make videos. So I only have two new videos for this month, but my blog has always and always will come first, but here are the videos I uploaded:

Book Haul:

Barnes and Noble:

NetGalley:

I once said that I’d never get a NetGalley because you can only get e-books and I don’t read e-books. But. I caved. Here are the titles I’ve been approved for and am SO EXCITED to read!

Now onto my TBR for August and some overall goals for August and sneak-peeks at what I have planned!

August TBR:

All of these books are specifically books I need to read for review and then A Storm of Swords is a book I’ve been reading/taking a break from for way too long now so I think it’s time that I finally finish it!

Coming Up on Blog:

• Review for Strange the Dreamer
• Review for The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue
• Review for I Believe in a Thing Called Love
• More discussion posts!

August is going to be a big month for book reviews so for some weeks there might end up being two book reviews and one random post, but I will stay to the schedule of posting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday no matter what!

I also have a guest post that I wrote for Joce over at Write Through the Night so it’ll be on her blog sometime soon!

Goals:

• Finish two classes for school
• Don’t slack on writing
• Write in my journal at least once a week
• Reach 500 blog followers
• Comment on other’s posts more often

I hope y’all liked this wrap up! It was long, but wrap ups typically are haha. Please let me know if you’d actually read these posts if I do them every month cause I don’t want to spend time on them but then nobody actually ends up reading them.

Let me know what you did in July and what you’ve read as well as what you’re planning on reading in August!

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