Living in Dystopia

If you're a reader and you read a lot of YA (young adult), you know dystopias are where it's at. It all sort of began with Harry Potter and has now expanded to the Hunger Games, the Maze Runner, Divergent and many other worlds that have yet to be moved onto the silver screen.

I read a lot of dystopian YA. I'm not going to lie--lately, I've been reading almost exclusively anything dystopian. I don't know why it's so intriguing to read about worlds similar to ours but completely different, but I'm obsessed and I know many other people are as well.

While the mainstream series are, for the most part, enjoyable, I thought I'd take a minute to recommend some lesser known dystopian series that are equally as fantastic. These are in no particular order, aside from the order of which I thought of them.

1. The Unwind Dystology by Neal Shusterman

I haven't actually completed this series yet, but I felt it needed to be listed because, first off, the main characters in the first book are from Ohio, and, second, the concept is super unique. The whole idea is that children can be sold off by their parents to be "unwound" or, essentially, taken apart piece by piece and given to someone like a transplant donor. The children don't get to make the decision for themselves, and this is all about kids (teens, really) trying desperately to escape their future of being unwound.

2. The Giver (The Quartet Series) by Lois Lowry

I know, this is considered to be more for "kids," but, as someone who loves YA with a passion, I would recommend this 10/10 for anyone who loves YA. This has a sort of unique concept, in that the world is trying to life on the safe side not even allowing people to see color any more. Life is entirely regulated, like many other dystopian books. You are not raised by your birth parents. You are raised by parents assigned to be the best set of folks for your success. If you're extremely lucky, you are eventually given a good job suited to who you are as a person and you do not get to say no. The government makes all of those decisions for you so you don't have to. The first three books are relatively short but the final book should really fall under the YA category. These are some of my favorites.

3. The Selection Series by Kiera Cass

I recommend this to anyone ever. I don't care who you are, this deserves a lot more glory than it's received. The best part? Sequels are still coming out! I feel like a lot of series have finished now, but this is still relatively new.

The idea is that the prince (or later, princess) that will eventually become king/queen needs help finding a partner so, much like other series, people are able to apply for this position. This does take a sort of Hunger Games feel in that the girls narrowed down to compete are essentially contestants in a competition. There is a competition feel but, in my opinion, this has more of a romance feel to it. The two main characters are easily in my top ten YA characters--they're likable, quirky and have an air of normalcy to them, so anyone can relate. That, for me, is the best part. There is a good amount of suspense throughout with the competition, which keeps the plot moving, and none of this stops in the other novels. Granted, I am a fast reader, but I read the first part of the series (the Selection, the Elite and the One) in just a couple days. I love this series a lot.

4. The Chemical Garden Trilogy by Lauren DeStefano

Holy crap this book! How did I never hear of it before randomly finding it on the shelves of this library?! The premise is interesting and one of my favorites: boys die at 20, girls die at 18. You can live a little bit (maybe a month or so) past that time, but never all that long, even with the best medical help in the world. Women are being bought by rich men that were born before the age curses for their sons who do have the illness to become wives. It's not in a creepy way--just in a "be my best friend before we both die" sort of way, and the world has become desolate. Picture a world that looks entirely like a run down amusement park or like the wastelands shown in the Walking Dead, but with random amazingly brilliant mansions filled with delicious foods, holograms and where Hawaii is merely a fairy tale.

This series all centers on a girl who is kidnapped from her brother and sold to the son of a rich man to be one of his three wives. It's she and her other two wives' job to try and give him a child before they both die, as well as live out the rest of their years happily ever after. You can imagine she doesn't enjoy being kidnapped and tries to get back to her twin brother. There's excellent characters, a beautiful love story, plot twists that left me completely shocked all surrounded by the mystic and magical world she's living in. There isn't actual magic, but there are certainly futuristic items and concepts that would probably be considered magical in the world we live in.

5. The Dissonance Series by Erika O'Rourke

I'm going to be totally honest--I only read the first book and I have absolutely no idea how to properly explain this and why it's so amazing. Del is the main character and she's a Walker. No, not a zombie from Walking Dead. She walks between worlds--it's a trait certain families have where one can simply find a crack where a decision was made, go through and see a world where a different decision would have been made (an echo). She falls in love with a boy in one of these worlds that she knows in her world, but a different version of that boy. This is the story of how she continues to find that boy in every world, how she falls in love with him and how she fights desperately to keep both him (the him in her world--and the other worlds, too) and her world alive and in harmony with all the other echoes of the world.

If that isn't enough information for you, I recommend looking the series up yourself. I find it's so unique I'm not quite sure how to put it into words, but I've really enjoyed it thus far. I love O'Rourke's writing style and her characters are pretty interesting as well.

Have you read any of these? Or any others that are often forgotten? If so, comment below and let me know! I'm always looking for a new dystopia to fall in love with!

Get Your Coloring On

School is stressful. Relationships are stressful. Basically, life is stressful. Video games can help unwind some times and, personally, I love a good dystopian book or movie for relaxing, but there's a craze that's exploded this year that's just as good: coloring. Coloring between the lines is no longer for elementary kids--it's moved its way all the way up through teenagers to adulthood. Not gonna lie, some of these coloring books and sheets are super intense.

It's no longer about coloring Pooh to be gold with a red shirt, or making Pete the Cat blue with yellow eyes. These coloring pages are about completely forgetting real life while you sit down and color these small details in however your heart feels at that current moment. These allow you to mindless go through and be creative with pens, markers, pencils or even crayons.

The coolest part about this? You can print off pages online for free. There are so many resources and people designing these for anyone to use. The rest is all up to your imagination. Well and, frankly, even if you don't have an imagination to speak of, it's therapeutic to just mindlessly color in the empty spaces.

I personally enjoy these for times where I feel really anxious about something--especially travel. I'm getting ready to go on a trip now as I type this, and these have been perfect for letting go and escaping the world for 10 minutes.

I know a lot of you have finished your exams for the first half of the year. While I'm not too sure how strict teachers are today, when I was in school, we were allowed to bring work to do after we finished each test. For me personally, coloring something as intense as this would've been a good way to clear my head for the next test.

I'm not sure which brilliant human came up with the idea to make such intricate coloring pages, but they deserve 5 gold stars. Coloring and art has always been something I've enjoyed, but I can't draw decently at all, so coloring is really all I have.

Have you hopped on board this hype train? If so, what do you enjoy coloring with most? Pens? Pencils? Markers? I definitely prefer colored pencils, but I think markers and pens can create some awesome almost stained glass-like art.

Starting a Blog

This is something I feel I have an expertise on. Granted, my degree isn't in blogging and I'm not sure there is one on "writing casually about thing I enjoy talking about," but I've been blogging for a really long time so I think I know at least something about it.

The first thing you need to think about when considering starting a blog is a topic--or a broad subject. It could be something as simple as writing about your daily life, to beauty, to music, but you need a subject to try and gain followers. Of course, you can totally just write about whatever you want if you don't care at all about people reading and responding. I have found, though, to keep people reading and returning, having a category to write about specifically tends to work best.

Once you've decided on that, you have so many different places you can start one. Personally, 10/10 recommend Wordpress. Blogger isn't bad, and you can use Tumblr, but I think Wordpress is the easiest to work with and you can typically get a pretty nice and short URL to link people to opposed to other places. I'm super biased, though, because I've been using Wordpress for at least 8 years now I think. It's great.

Blogger is okay and the customization for its appearance is definitely similar to Wordpress, but I felt it was still more complicated. With Wordpress, you can basically design the graphics you want in it (or Google image search them if you want to live life on the edge with copyright infringement--which I do not recommend) and go to the customization area, upload them and bam.

Tumblr is roughly 10x more complicated. I honestly feel like, if you have zero knowledge on how to build and code a website from scratch (aka CSS and HTML), it's super complicated. That said, if you have knowledge of those two things, Tumblr is fantastic. I have one that I almost never update! (Seriously, I update maybe once a year if I remember.)

Once you've done that and you've decided where you want to start it, come up with a name--short and sweet. The shorter, the easier to remember the better. Remember, if you're looking for people to read it, you'll want it to be memorable. I had one for a while that was simply my nickname.me (.me is like a .com or .net) and it did pretty well. There's also famous people that have things like Zoella (Zoe+lla) and SprinkleOfGlitter, which is longer but still rolls of the tongue.

Then you're going to want to create your blog. Make sure the design isn't totally crazy colorful and easy on the eyes. Color is never a bad thing, but you want people to want to stay and not run away from the blinking lights and neon colors.

Write that first blog post--an intro. Who are you? If you don't want to use your real name, what nickname do you want people to call you? And don't choose something silly--you don't want to come off like a weirdo after all. Talk about what you're planning to blog about, what your goals are and say hi to those reading it. It may take a while to acquire readers but, once you do, you can connect with them through comments and replying to those comments and it's a great feeling to interact with people that enjoy what you're doing.

Finally, be sure to always have fun. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. Hobbies are all about fun!

Now, get out there and blog!~