Since I last wrote, I’ve read things that were beautiful, bizarre, disturbing, and downright ugly—the full range of human experience. Every time I sit down to write this letter, I’m struck by how hard it is to capture that feeling...the sheer thrill of reading. I often feel like a child still fumbling for the right words, overwhelmed by the depth of emotion and unable to name it. Maybe that’s why this letter exists at all—an imperfect attempt to translate and record the experience.

Lately, I’ve been more active in the London Writers’ Salon community, and it’s completely changed my relationship with reading and writing. I’m writing more (both seriously + silly), and reading more too. (Pitch prep research still needs fine-tuning, but it’s coming along.)

What’s funny is how different reading feels now. I used to think of it in terms of yearly book counts, neat logs, shareable screenshots. But these days, it’s less about completion and more about immersion. Reading is often messy and nourishing. It involves multiple books at once, following curiosity across authors and genres, and diving deep when something catches.

One LWS member shared a quote from Annie Dillard that captured this beautifully. Actually, her whole talk to creative writing students at UNC is worth a read.

A real milestone for me has been finally setting up my Substack. For almost a year now, it’s been where I spend most of my online time—definitely not X, and least of all Instagram. And honestly, I’ve been loving it. It offers a bit of everything: sharper takes than mainstream journalism, fascinating science, literary fiction and nonfiction, bold criticism, intimate confessionals - it’s endless.

Because I care so much about the platform, hold the writing and writers there in such high regard—I ended up putting a strange kind of pressure on myself. I stopped posting and slipped into quiet consumption instead. Unpopular opinion, maybe, but I think that phase can be useful for new writers. Still, I reached a point where the hesitation started to feel heavy. So I tried to break through it with a post—an attempt to explain myself, anchored around a story that really shifted something for me: Accidental Sagacity. It started out funny. After enough rewrites, I’m not sure what survived—but on May 1st, it did its job. It cracked open the door on my new profile. Maybe one day I’ll give it the edit it deserves. For now, it’s a beginning.

If I had to sum up this discovery, the origin of serendipity felt unexpectedly restorative. I had grown to hate the word in recent years. It had become hollow, tangled in an obsession with the 'self', sort of an inadvertent passivity about luck. Main character energy, yadda yadda. Then I learned Horace Walpole coined it from a Persian tale from the Middle Ages about three Princes who solved problems through simple analysis. They were observant, more Marple than mythic—quietly clever, never self-important. They weren’t chasing destiny. They were just paying attention. And in the end, they cleared their own names not by force, but by noticing what others missed. It’s wild how far a word can drift from its roots. The word feels honest again. I think I love it.

On my long-standing quest to learn more about literary criticism, the London Review of Books has become a favored resource. Each review is a crafted artwork itself—teaching me about the book while demonstrating how a reader can truly read. I discovered Joanna Biggs through LRB and found her first book's premise fascinating. After ordering it, I began devouring it—then stopped. When the right book finds you at the right moment, you must sip and savor slowly. Biggs has created a skillful map of nine women writers, their heroines, and lessons from each novel, interwoven with her own journey as writer and person. It's beautiful. Though only halfway through, I already know I'll return to it repeatedly. I'm so lucky to have found it at this exact stage of my life.

One thing I learned in April is how to prioritize the dual art of writing and reading. As Annie Dillard better describes above—it's a cycle that feeds itself. The LWS 8am hour has been a godsend. For now, I'm pursuing prompts mostly through Substack, but I'm excited to start exploring independent pieces through submission.