Margin Notes from April 🖊️ 💌

a recap of what overflowed from this month's essays and into the margins

May 04, 2026

We’re having a real spring in Texas this year. Not the kind that blinks and becomes summer before you can put your sandals on — an actual, unhurried, gloriously inconvenient spring. Pollen caught in my hair. Seventy degrees on a Sunday. Rain that lingered long enough to fill the streams, make puddles, and soak the backyard roses.

It feels right. Embarrassingly on the nose, if I’m being honest.

Because April felt like hands still in the dirt. Not in a poetic, romanticized way — in a literal, unglamorous, knees-dirty kind of way. Picking weeds. Shooing off bugs. Placing mulch carefully around things that aren’t ready to bloom yet, but will be. There was no triumphant moment. No finished product. Just the quiet, necessary work of tending.

I needed that. A harsh and grounding reminder that when there’s not enough time in the day — and there in fact was not enough time in April — the answer isn’t to do more. It’s to be aggressively intentional about your free time and spend it doing what fills you up.

May has burst through the door, forgetting to knock. My husband turns 30 and wraps up his first year of law school (!). Long-distance friends are arriving for the first time in a year (!!). I’m a featured speaker at a book festival (!!!). I hit one year as a Vice President of Marketing and Communications (!!!!). I’m traveling out of the country with my family for a week (!!!!!).

And I’m back here. Writing to you, diva.

There’s so much life happening in the next thirty days that I’m already worried I won’t be able to capture the feeling of it all — the first hug, the celebration dinner, the smell of the sea breeze. I want to bottle all of it. Slow it down. But maybe that’s exactly what April was for. You can’t rush a bloom. Nor can you keep the bloom perfect forever. We just have to enjoy it while we have it.

Writing Rituals I’m Vibing With

For most of April, writing rituals were few and far between. My job requires an immense amount of creative energy, and somewhere around mid-month, I felt like my well had run dry. My hands cramped. My eyes hurt. I’d been sitting and staring at a screen all day, and the idea of opening a journal (or my laptop) felt like adding another task to an already bottomless list.

What actually got me out of my head and into my mody was writing for less than five minutes. Margin scribbles. A sentence between meetings. A half-thought during lunch.

Social media has done something insidious to my idea of a writing practice. It’s made it look and feel like a production. A carefully arranged desk. A steaming cup of tea and a half-eaten homemade muffin. The implication being: if you don’t have the set, you don’t have the practice. And I’m embarrassed to admit that aesthetics fully kept me from feeling like I had enough time to sit down and write.

But here’s the thing. Writing can happen anywhere.

It should happen as often as possible because the act of sprouting words onto a page is the whole point. This newsletter was born from wanting to write more and to write for me.

Library By Alyssa (because writers are readers too)

I read one book in April (don’t come for me, I told you April was busy), for smutty book club: Tourist Season by Brynne Weaver. A camp romance novel about two serial killers who fall in love at a seaside town called Cape Carnage…no, I’m not kidding. Think the Dream Harbor series, but the farmers and bookstore owners are also quietly murdering people. I loved it. I will not be taking questions.

I’m currently in the middle of two very different reads. My first is a re-read of Devotions by Mary Oliver, because ya girl is, once again, going through it and needs to actually and metaphorically touch as much grass as possible.

I’m also ten chapters into Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which is a genuinely big deal for me. I don’t really read male authors. I’m not a sci-fi person. And yet here I am, thoroughly invested. Probably because I keep picturing the protagonist as Ryan Gosling, and that helps enormously. (I also haven’t seen the movie. Please do not spoil it for me.)

What’s New With Julia’s Shelf Discovery

I will be at the Greater Austin Book Festival on May 16th as both a vendor and a panelist, and I still haven’t fully processed that fact.

I’ll be tabling on the third floor from 10 am–5 pm — homemade bookmarks, stickers, coloring pages, and copies of Julia’s Shelf Discovery. Then at 2 pm, I’ll be on a panel with three other local authors talking about the importance of diversity and community in children’s literature.

If you’re in or around Austin, diva, come find me. Say hi and watch me cry in public because I’m an author!!!!! getting to sit around other authors!!!!!! and talk about the book I wrote!!!!

April felt like the trenches. But the trenches have dirt, and I was holding seeds through clenched fists. I just had to trust myself enough to let them go.

Drop them in the soil and believe I’d tend to them long enough that they’d turn into something I’m proud of. May is the something. I just have to remember to look up long enough to see it.

PS: I made a Summer 2026 Mood Board and thought I’d share <3 What are your summer plans? How are you going to soak up the sun?

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