June Wrap-Up!

June was a pretty good month for me. I’ve relaxed a lot, read, written, and generally enjoyed myself. I can’t believe my summer vacation is already almost halfway gone, though!

Shout out to the Supreme Court for finally ruling in favor of gay marriage. There aren’t words for how great it is to see America take another step towards true equality.

52 Letters in the Alphabet reached 300 followers this month! Thank you so much to all of the people who have read, liked, and commented on my posts, and the super amazing people who have decided to follow my blog! You are all amazing. 🙂

Last week, I started taking a ballet class at a local community college for PE credit at my high school (that’s a very long story…). I’m enjoying the class, but doing ballet four days a week for at least two hours a day has left me mentally and physically drained. My productivity has taken a nose-dive; I’ve rewatched a lot of Psych and Scrubs episodes instead of writing…whooops.

Thankfully, my reading hasn’t suffered too much from my exhaustion. I read nine books in June, which puts me perfectly on track to achieve my goal of reading 20 books this summer. My weekend vacation helped a lot with this total, and without it, I would be painfully behind, to be honest.

I discussed whether reading books quickly actually improves or detracts from the reading process. I also had my sixth book haul, though I’ve already read most of the books I bought. I’m itching to get more new, amazing books to read (and I’m taking recommendations!).

Here are the books I read this month:

I reviewed four of the nine books (I’ll catch up this month, I promise!): The Perilous Sea (Elemental trilogy #2) by Sherry Thomas, Uprooted by Naomi Novik (this one is AMAZING), Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas. I also reviewed the first book in the Elemental trilogy, The Burning Sky, which I read in May. Using my last ten book reviews, I made word clouds to analyze my word choice during reviews.

I had 16 posts this month! That’s one post almost every other day, mathematically, and I never broke my goal of having at least three posts a week. I am so proud of myself for at least sticking to blogging when I lagged in the fiction writing department, though I did discuss the importance of balancing the writing time I devote to this blog with the amount of man hours I put into my WIP.

I took part in three Top Ten Tuesdays: Top Ten Books I’d Like to See as Movies/TV Shows, Top Ten TTT Topics I Wish I’d Taken Part In, and Top Ten Books I’ve Read So Far in 2015. A lot of my June reads made that last list.

In the writing world, I added 10,740 words to my WIP, Devil May Care, bringing my overall total up to 64,000 words! I also read through and did some light edits on the first 50,000 words, and updated my various spreadsheets that I use to keep track of everything. In regards to this blog, I started my series of posts talking about the process of writing the second draft of my WIP, Second Draft Journal.

On this blog, I took part in one of Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Contest with my short story “Just Another Dead Guy” and shared my poem “Little Echoes.” I wish I’d shared more writing, and I plan to get back into poetry in July.

---

So there’s my June! Pretty good overall. How was your June? What books did you read? Did you write? And what are your July plans?