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February-August 2018 Monthly Wrap-Up: Books & Freelance Work

Welcome to my February-August 2018 monthly wrap-up! 🙂

Because I haven’t posted an update since February, I thought it would be good to merge the wrap-ups together into a single post. (September’s will go with October’s the next month.)

Here’s a brief personal life summary before I dive deep into projects, readings and freelance work news:

• My dad was diagnosed with leukemia in early March and admitted to the hospital shortly thereafter. It hit me pretty bad and I fell into a depression that has only recently started to fade (dad is okay, he got his marrow transplanted and his health is slowly improving, although it’s going to be a long journey—positive thoughts and prayers are appreciated ♥)
• My psychotherapist and a psychotherapy book helped me find the right diagnosis for my condition: it’s not an Asperger’s Syndrome as we suspected, but High Sensitivity. I’m an HSP. I’m trying to find a good neurologist to see before the year ends because I want to find some kind of ‘fix’ for my sensory processing issues (if there’s any; I hope there is…)

Reads

Apart from one book in February that I read for my first The Books Brothers monthly challenge (note: this is an Italian group), I haven’t read a lot (or finished a book anyway) until May, which was the month when my reading muse woke up again and pushed me to read more.

What a nice sensation! I had missed it. 🙂

These are the books I read from February to August 31 in chronological order:

1. Il mio inverno a Zerolandia by Paola Predicatori (Italian)
2. Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan (Italian translation)
3. La fattoria degli animali by George Orwell (Italian translation of Animal Farm)
4. Lontano dal pianeta silenzioso by C.S. Lewis (Italian translation of Out of the Silent Planet, Space Trilogy #1)
5. Sei donne che hanno cambiato il mondo by Gabriella Greison (Italian)
6. Chiamami col tuo nome by André Aciman (Italian translation of Call Me by Your Name)
7. Flatlandia by Edwin A. Abbott (Italian translation of Flatland)
8. Fallen by Lauren Kate (Italian translation)
9. Breastfeeding Without Birthing by Alyssa Schnell
10. Accanto alla macchina by Ellen Ullman (Italian translation of Close to the Machine)
11. A che servono i Greci e i Romani? by Maurizio Bettini (Italian)
12. La manutenzione dei sensi by Franco Faggiani (Italian)

This is the book I have to finish reading:

• Trilogia dell’Area X (Italian translation of Area X Trilogy) by Jeff Vandermeer – I only read the first novel (Annihilation) and part of the second (Acceptance) but I had to stop because the tone of the novel was giving me strong anxiety attacks. I’m going to resume reading this one when I’m calm and mentally stable

Some of these books come from a huge book haul I gathered between June and July, but I’ll tell you more about that in another post.

You can follow my 2018 reading challenge on Goodreads to keep up with my readings and reviews.

Freelance Work

So many articles! I wrote seven just for Monitor Backlinks these months, all about different areas of SEO.

Here’s the list:

• The Competitor Backlink Spy Guide: How to Be Both Sneaky and Ethical
• Homepage Backlinks: How to Get the Right Links Through Your Front Door
• Subdomain Backlinks: How to Earn Substantial Backlinks from Sublime Subdomains
• Link Building Done Right: The Complete Guide to Choosing and Customizing a Linkbuilding Strategy
• 14 Laser-Targeted Strategies to Build Niche Backlinks
• Bing SEO: 7 Practical Ways to Get More Traffic from Bing (and Yahoo!)
• How to (Maybe) Get Google Sitelinks and If They’re Worth Your Time

And a couple of articles for CoSpot’s Content Marketer blog, too:

• 8 SEO Reporting Tools to Fully Audit Your Site’s SEO Health
• WooRank Review: Cramming All Your Marketing Data into One Impressive Tool

Finally, WHSR published my two most recent articles and I’m so happy because I’m hardly working for this client anymore from now on. It’s been a long journey, I’ve been with them since 2012 and I hope we’ll collaborate again the future. 🙂

Here are the articles:

• How to Sell An Online Course On A Non-Popular Topic (And Generate Traffic)
• How (Not) to Monetize Your Blog Newsletter. The Practical Guide

That’s all for this monthly wrap-up. 🙂 Looking forward to a brighter last trimester of the year!

Email me at lu@luana.me if you want to share some of your achievements or plans for the end of 2018 with me. I’m always open to making new friends! Also, use my email to leave a comment on this post: I will happily publish it manually below if you so desire.

Comments:

I’m so sorry to hear about your father, I hope he continues to feel better! Also, totally inspired by all the books you read, I need to start reading again!

— Justine Young, Owner & Creator at Little Dove

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