Oh dear, look at the time...

Has it really been almost two years? Wow, I seem to have nearly abandoned my journals... well, I wasn't TOTALLY absent from deviantart. I have been checking messages and things, even though I haven't uploaded many new deviations... but I do have things I'd like to upload soon! Not sure when, but I will eventually. xD

If you've visited my pages in the distant past, then you may have noticed that many of my pages are... missing. Well, I started doing some housecleaning recently; tidying up submissions, getting rid of old deviations. I'm generally shooting to reinvent my dA page, to clean up the mess my immature self left in its wake several years past. It'll take a while to hit every last detail, but I'm chipping away at it bit by bit over the weeks.

In other news, I'm writing a novel! As in, an actual, feature-length book, to be printed and read in hardcover format! I've been working on it since fall of 2014, when I came up with the idea. Currently, I'm about 40,000 words in (plus some additional 15,000 words of notes, plot details, research, et cetera... xD I'm putting an inordinate amount of thought into its preparation. I want it to be perfect~). Sorry, though, it's something of a passion project, so I probably won't be posting much about it here. It's supposed to be a gift exclusively for my close friends. Well, maybe after I've finished this reinventing stuff I'll post excerpts or graphics that I've made to accompany the text. We'll see.

More news: I have some new social media now! You can find me on Instagram @ L_Scarlet and my personal tumblr is similarly "loyalscarlet". (But I plan to make another one soon and to change the names; one personal, one for book and art related things.) On my Instagram, I've been keeping an up-to-date list of the books that I'm currently reading, if you're interested in that. Which brings me to that last topic of discussion...

Oh my. How many books have I read in the past two years? Dozens and dozens, no doubt... I will probably forget a whole bunch, but here goes nothing...

In no particular order:

• Library Wars (Vols. 11–14, although I may have reread the whole series again at some point)
• Percy Jackson's Greek Gods
• Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes
• The Heroes of Olympus (Books 4 and 5)
• The Red Pyramid (Just started rereading that one!)
• The First Battle (Warriors: Dawn of the Clans #3)
• Durarara!! Yellow Scarves Arc (All three volumes)
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Rift
• City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments #3)
• Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1)
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (by Stephen King)
• Steal Like an Artist
• The Legend of Korra: The Art of the Animated Series (All four books)
• The Great Zoo of China
• The Tournament
• Troll Mountain
• Let It Snow
• Blue is the Warmest Color
• This Star Won't Go Out
• The Angel of Elhamburg
• Chikubushima
• S. (otherwise known as Ship of Theseus, by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst; I've only just started.)
• Catch-22
• Invisible Man
• The Insider (Kingdom Keepers #7)
• The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (Whole series)
• Toccata II (by Shilin Huang)
• The Collectors (by Philip Pullman)
• Ripped Wings: Jesza's Journey (by Odia Kane)
• Bionic Punchline (by Damon L. Wakes)
• Osiris Likes This (also by Mr. Wakes)
• Tallstar's Revenge
• More Sherlock Holmes... don't remember which volume I'm on...
• Janson's History of Art (that's for school... this book is gargantuan o_o)
• Demigods & Magicians (AKA the short triptych of crossover stories that Rick Riordan wrote)
• Gaia (this is a really great webcomic I started reading; definitely check it out!)
• Carciphona (while I'm listing webcomics~)
• Cut Time (another webcomic, and this one's just starting out! The art is very pretty, though it can be tough to follow at times... I think it's just the art style, but it is very pretty art~ The first chapter was just completed, and I'm expecting really great things to follow! Looks very promising!)
• The Hogwarts Library (three slim volumes that come from within the Harry Potter world)
• Lyra's Oxford
• Once Upon a Time in the North
• Lost in Babylon (Seven Wonders #2)
• Heart of Darkness
• Death of a Salesman
• Of Mice and Men

And then, by my latest count, I have 52 more books in my "to-read" pile. I'm basically getting books faster than I can read them right now. xD I did some quick figures and it's probably going to take me quite a number of years to whittle that pile back down to nothing. So, I think I'm going to put myself on a spending freeze for books lmbo. Well, unless people give me more Barnes & Noble gift cards, then I kind of have to use them. I will do my best, though, to stop buying books after I get Harry Potter and the Cursed Child this summer!! It is going to be difficult, but it's for the greater good... I must read what I already have... sigh... lol, wish me luck.