A while back, I shared a list of my ten most-read authors. Since then, I've gone through and added all the books I can remember reading when I was younger to my Goodreads. Obviously there will still be many that I've forgotten, but my Goodreads now has a more accurate representation of my reading habits through the years. As such, I thought I'd share an updated list of the authors I've read the most books by.

1) Ann M. Martin. I've read 42 books by The Baby-Sitters Club's author, which is unsurprising. It was one of my favorite series as a kid/tween. Dawn was my favorite character from the original Baby-Sitters Club group, purely because she had blond hair down to her waist just like I wanted, but in the later groups I developed a much stronger liking for Mallory.

2) Ben M. Baglio. Around the same time, Baglio was the author of two other of my favorite series, Animal Ark and Dolphin Diaries. (Both are about young girls working to help save and protect animals.) As such, he comes in second with 34 books read.

3) Meg Cabot. This author of many books across various genres, specializing in light reads for women and girls, came in first in my old post. In my updated list, she's in third with 33 books read. As I said in that post, Avalon High might be my favorite book of hers, although it's hard to choose.

4) Erin Hunter. I've now read 28 books by the author team who created Warriors and a number of other MG animal-centric fantasy series.

Today, I'd like to do another On This Day in My History, where I go through my (copious) diaries and summarize what happened in my life on May 12th each year. Let's go!

May 12th, 2004, Ten Years Old
I made a list of books I wanted to read and wrote nothing else.

May 12th, 2005, Eleven Years Old
All I wrote was "Okay."

​No May 12th entry in 2006.

Hello, readers! Today I'm participating in the Ch1Con & Ch21Con 2018 Blog Tour, an annual tour in preparation for this year’s conferences, which brings original content from the Chapter One Events team to a number of fantastic, writing-related blogs. I'm going to be interviewing team member Katelyn Pettit, so stay tuned!

​*Long post ahoy*

It's been a while since I shared a "day in the life" post. This is mostly because I've been so sick for the past few years that my daily life is not really that interesting. But I do want to share some of the reality of chronically ill living with you, and my life has improved enough to keep it from being too super boring. So I figured it was time to share, not a day in my life, but a week in my life, starting last Saturday.

*Long post ahoy!*

All right! So, as you know, at the end of each year, I post a list of the best YA books of the year. I don't limit the number I choose for those, and there's usually quite a few of various genres! But for a Top Ten Tuesday I did a while back, they had us do a "flashback," and I decided to go back and list the best YA books of the years I wasn't blogging during. Per the nature of that series, I chose ten books from 2012 to share (which was incredibly difficult). Today, even though I'm no longer doing Top Ten Tuesdays, I'd like to do the next installment and share with you the ten best YA books from 2011 (in my opinion). Here we go!

1) The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson. Y'all know this YA fantasy trilogy, about a young woman in an arranged marriage trying to figure out her path as a Chosen One, is one of my favorite book series. The first book in it was indeed published in 2011. 

2) Across the Universe by Beth Revis​. Beth Revis is a delight, and so is her debut YA sci-fi trilogy about a couple of teens on a generational spaceship travelling to a new home planet who uncover a murderous political scheme. This is the first book in that series.

​3) Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi. This is the first in yet another series that I often recommend, an emotional YA dystopian with unusual style/formatting about a girl who, after being imprisoned for years because of her deadly touch, falls in love for the first time.

As I've said before, I really liked the newest Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi. It might even be my favorite of the Star Wars movies, although it's hard to pick! So I was a little surprised at all the uproar after the release. Many fans hated The Last Jedi. One of the big complaints I've seen is that Luke was out of character, that there's no way he would exile himself to a distant planet with a threat like the First Order on the horizon and that he would never believe the Jedi should end. But I think Luke was perfectly in character. So here's my analysis of The Last Jedi from Luke's point of view: how his ill-informed comparison between Kylo and Anakin led him to make this choice--and how, in The Last Jedi, he realizes it was a mistake.

*Spoilers ahoy!* *Long post ahoy!*

All right! It's time for our first seasonal humor post, where I share the twenty-five funniest posts and the funniest video I've seen across the last three months. (Although, of course, you can see some more in my February humor post, pre-blog schedule change.) Enjoy, and I'll see you again next week!

All right! As promised, I'm sharing the books at the top of my to-read list for the next quarter, Spring 2018, of which there are eight. I shared five of these already as "Waiting On" Wednesdays, but the rest are new.

This post idea comes from Top Ten Tuesday, where bloggers have been prompted to post their favorite book covers in their favorite color! My favorite color is purple, so here are some awesome purple book covers for you to enjoy. These are all taken from my "love the cover" bookshelf on Goodreads, in order of publication.

Once again, apologies for missing the previous week. I had another bout of illness, because I'm lucky like that. In any case, today I thought I'd give y'all an update on my life via "-ing" verbs, in another Taking Stock of My Life.

Eating: green cookies!
Drinking: water
Wearing: a long black bubble dress and a long-sleeve plaid purple and green shirt
Reading: The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton
Writing: a blog post, at this particular moment, LOL
Editing: CUCUY, except I've gotten distracted by FamilySearch
Listening: to "Champion" by Fall Out Boy
Watching: Star Trek: Voyager in brief spurts
Bookmarking: most recently, a random last name generator shown in this post
Playing: Bang! with some church friends
Looking: for the places where my family lines end on FamilySearch

My apologies for missing last week! I had to take a sick day. :P

Now it's time for another round of speedlinking, where I share some cool stuff from across the Internet for you to enjoy!

First off, I added the two Avengers: Infinity War trailers to my Speedlinking playlist on YouTube (#23 and 24), because THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT EVENT THAT I'M NOT SURE MY FEELINGS WILL SURVIVE. (Can you believe it now has an April 27 release worldwide?) *Language warning on that link*

Next, a few links that may be useful to you writers out there. A lot of people online have been talking about the Notebook.ai, a worldbuilding program online that has both a free and a paid version. It looks really awesome, and I'm sure a lot of you would enjoy using it. Me, I've found that I do better freeform, using Word--even my one go at the ever-popular Scrivener didn't work out. Nevertheless, this looks like something a lot of people will find very useful.

There's also a random last name generator, for those less-important characters who you just need to name, darnit. It's got a great variety of names from every culture, at least from what I've seen so far, and it's a little less awkward than going through your Twitter feed. :)

Then there's the Atlas Obscura, a website where you can look up basically any location to find its most interesting attractions. I think this could be useful for real-world worldbuilding, as one of many pieces of research you'll have to do when including a real city in your stories.

Well, the high of WriteOnCon has passed, and I have realized that I need to make some massive edits on CUCUY, removing something that was originally a big part of the manuscript. It's gonna be a lot of work. I don't mind that, really (mostly), but I do worry I'll be passing my "deadline" with my betas/CPs again. I guess we'll see!

Today, in honor of Valentine's Day, I wanted to talk about OCD and romance.

*Long post ahoy.*

First, I'd like to share some important news about this blog. During WriteOnCon 2018, one idea that came up a few times is that the social media you use should always be something that you enjoy. If you don't enjoy it, you should feel free to pull back and do it less, or not at all. After hearing that, I've decided to pull back a little more on this blog.

For the first few years, I really enjoyed blogging here. But as my illnesses got worse, I began running out of both ideas and energy. I've been trying a lot of different blogging schedules and tags to try and make up for that, but I'm not getting the interaction that I like, and I really do feel like I've already written the bulk of the blog posts that I wanted to. I don't want to stop blogging entirely, because I do really like sharing my thoughts when I have them, but I'm not interested in doing it on the same basis that I have been.

So I'm going to change my schedule again and blog once a week, on Saturdays. I may put up bonus posts on Wednesdays--like this one!--if I have something extra to talk about, but for the most part, it'll be four posts a month. That means no more "Waiting On" Wednesdays or Top Ten Tuesdays. But I will post seasonal lists of the books on my top TBR, and I'm sure some of the ideas from Top Ten Tuesday will show up in future posts. Monthly humor posts are also going to change to seasonal humor posts, with my favorite twenty-five funny posts from Tumblr and Pinterest for each three month block. Additionally this means that my weekly email newsletters will change to monthly newsletters.

I intend to be just as present on my other social media profiles as ever, and I hope that people will look through this blog and see what I've talked about in the past if they're looking for specific information--or just ask me! The Recommended Posts page is still up, and I've added an archive to the sidebar so you can browse through my old posts a little more easily.

January is finally over! Let's celebrate with some funny Internet posts. Enjoy, and I'll be back next week for a summary of this weekend's WriteOnCon.

It's time for Top Ten Tuesday, a book blog tag hosted by The Broke and the Bookish! Today's topic is Top Ten Books That Have Been On My TBR the Longest. So here are the books I shelved a while back--and still haven't gotten to--starting from December 2013. (You can compare to this list from a little over a year ago.)

1) Slated by Teri Terry. This is the one book that's still on my TBR from the last time I did this post, a YA sci-fi dystopian about memory wiping.

​2) Mad Love by Suzanne Selfors. This is a YA fantasy novel about a girl who takes over writing her mom's romance novels when her mom's mental illness gets in the way of her work--only to start having visions about Cupid.

3) After the End by Amy Plum. Another YA sci-fi dystopian, this one about a girl who grew up believing that the rest of the world had been destroyed by nuclear bombardment--only to find out it's not true.

4) Blood and Salt by Kim Liggert. This is a YA horror novel where Romeo and Juliet meets Children of the Corn. Fun, right?