Since I feel like a lot of you only know my reading tastes and not really much about me, I thought I’d do a little Q&A about my life and everything else. The questions are all from Aradhna, Emon Economist, and Olivia. Thank you all! If you somehow didn’t know this, my name is Lia and I’m Dutch. I’m 21 years old. I’m obsessed with a lot of things like space, psychology, feminism, Hamilton, watching youtube, creating things, and, of course, books.

What’s a day in my life like?

My life is well… pretty boring right now. I’ve graduated from university in February and  my master’s will start in September so I’m basically having half a year off. And that’s a lot for me, because I need to feel productive to feel good and that’s is hard with so much time. So what I’m doing right now is mostly sleeping in, doing a lot of art, reading and working occasionally. Though I’m starting my new (part-time) job tomorrow so it’s probably going to change!

How do you feel about pineapple on pizza?

I’m personally not a big pineapple fan but I’d pick pineapple over peperoni as a pizza topping any day. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be on a pizza because you can put literally anything on a pizza (I know a place they make Nutella pizzas and I think they once sold rookworst (a Dutch sausage) on pizza).

What do you think it would be like to live on Mars?

I love this question! I’ve actually been watching a lot of documentaries on space which is something I fell in love with a month ago. I think the thing about moving to Mars is that it’s pretty much final. Once you go, there’s a very small chance of you coming back. You’re leaving all the comforts of Earth behind for an unknown. So I think it’s super scary to move there, but I think life would be really cool as well. It would be such an awesome experience to rediscover everything. I think it could be so lonely though, because you’re stuck with the same people and if you can’t make that work, it’s going to be very hard.

What’s something you read and loved even though it’s not the sort of thing you would normally expect to enjoy?

For the last week(s) the only thing I’ve been interested in reading has been non-fiction. That’s so out-of-character for me because reading non-fiction has always felt like a chore. I just didn’t really enjoy it much and now I’m weirdly obsessed with it.

What’s your blogging process like?

My blogging process is pretty straight-forward. I have a schedule of posting three times a week (currently that’s Monday, Thursday, Saturday) and then I procrastinate writing a blog post for as long as I can and then I draft, edit, post, usually in one go. Sometimes I plan beforehand but as right now I just make up what I do as I go.

What do you study at uni?

I currently don’t study anything but my major was Psychology & Technology, which is about the interaction between human and technology. It was a bit all over the place but really interesting and I learned a lot about how technology can help people but also the other way around how people can help develop technology better.

In September I will start my master’s which is Economic Psychology, which is about the psychology behind decision making, marketing, buying behavior etc. I would love to end up in marketing!

How do you balance reading and studying?

Well, as said, I don’t study currently, but when I did study, I mainly read on the train. I had a really big commute and didn’t want to move so I spent a lot of hours reading on the train. And on top of that, I read at night before going to bed to relax.

How do you choose what to read next?

I’ve always just used my goodreads TBR as a guideline to what to pick up next and it’s like insanely small right now (there’s 20 books on there). I have a weird relationship with my TBR on goodreads because for the longest time I’ve been wanting to make it smaller and now it’s really small and I’m just ignoring it completely and picking up whatever I feel like reading at the moment. And right now, that’s non-fiction. So I’m a mood-reader now.

How do you come up with design ideas for your store? And how do you go about designing them?

You might know I have a redbubble store and a society6 store, which are websites that allow you to upload your art and sell it on different things like t-shirts and mugs and posters. I create a lot of things for that and lately I’ve been making a lot of art (also check out my artsy insta?) and am trying to get better at using my drawing pad. For my “YA Icons” series I get inspiration from pinterest and looking up images of people. For the rest… I don’t really know. I like using photoshop brushes and nice fonts which always inspires me.

I don’t really have a set way in which I make the designs, it really depends on what I’m working on. If it’s more traditional art, I use a lot of reference pictures. If it’s more typography or handlettering, I look up fonts and quotes. You know, this is so hard to explain, I just… do stuff and if it works it works, if it doesn’t I abandon it.

For software, I used to use photoshop, but since I stopped uni, I couldn’t use my student license anymore and since photoshop is expensive, I switched to Krita. Krita is free software and pretty good if you want to make art but if you want to work with typography it’s quite terrible, so I haven’t done much with typography lately.

What’s a weird thing you are obsessed with that people don’t know about you? What more questions do you have for me? I’ll answer them below!