January Updates

Featured image taken by Nastassia A. Alvarez.

Goodbye birthday month, hello Black History and love month!

In honor of Black History month, you should check out Rachel Cargle’s Instagram and follow her research prompts to #DoTheWork of educating yourselves on Black history.

In honor of love I am giving some Valentine’s Day Sales (more below) to help you celebrate all your loved ones this month!

This past month was great with my birthday reflections and celebrations. I finished rereading the Harry Potter series and read a new book called The Only Woman In the Room by Marie Benedict (for which I am attending the Barnes and Noble book club tonight!). I’m excited about reading more books this year, so maybe I’ll be sharing some reviews in the future. We shall see!

But as far as work goes, things have been getting a little rough. I realized that YouTube takes WAY more time than I expected, so I’m going to downsize from two videos per week with the occasional third (Timelapse Tuesdays, Thursday Thoughts, Saturday Songs) to one video per week with the occasional second. So what I’ll do is alternate between my feminist videos and mental health videos weekly on Saturdays. That being said, I’ll be changing the names of those segments (farewell, alliteration) to Unpacking With Aly where I will alternate between unpacking topics under the themes of feminism and mental health/illness (with an occasional overlap).

Also, as some of you may have noticed, I already introduced a new segment called Real Talk With Aly. This allows me the liberty to make an unscripted video on what’s been on my mind, thus not requiring research and planning, for the weeks that I’m not doing so well and need more time to take care of myself. This way you’ll still get a video from me every week, but some less educational than others.

I’m hoping this change will allow me to put more effort into Patreon. I’ve only been putting two posts a week on there which seems hardly fair for people paying me for exclusive content. I haven’t determined my new posting schedule yet for Patreon, but I’m working on ideas to make it better for my beloved Coffee Beans. Feedback is always appreciated! You can share your ideas in the comments below or private message!

And now for everyone’s favorite place to peruse what people have been up to: Instagram. With the occasional skipped day, I’ve been posting pretty consistently five days a week (Tuesday through Saturday) while taking my weekends off. For January I did a mini series of Tiled Pet Portraits alternating with haikus. I want to get more creative with those posts by changing it up every month. So for this month I want to alternate between sonnet excerpts and couple portraits. The sonnets will be by me to promote my 50% off  Sonnet Sale for Valentine’s Day and the portraits will be of people and animals that are lovers, friends, or family which I will also be 50% off for Valentine e-cards.

All right, folx! That’s all I have in the way of updates this month! Stay tuned for my next post and subscribe to my mailing list if you haven’t already so that you can get notified when I post again!

Love always,

Alyssa