Announcing my next book!

Book ten!

Hi friends! I am SO excited to announce that my tenth (10th!!!) book is coming out this fall! It’s called It’s Only Dancing, it’s my YA debut, it comes out on October 6th, and here’s the cover:

Look at those sprayed edges, aren’t they gorgeous? There are a ton of more details about the book in this post over at People! I had the time of my life writing this book (get it? you will if you click through) and I’m thrilled you’ll all get to read it soon (well, soon-ish). This book is with Scholastic, and as a HUGE Scholastic book fair devotee as a kid, I am SO excited to be publishing a book with them (my mom screamed when I told her about it).

As always, you can preorder a signed copy through my local bookstore, East Bay Booksellers, and you can also preorder it from your own local independent bookstore, or from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, LibroFM, and everywhere else you buy books! (Audio is coming to all of the places, don’t worry audiobook lovers!) (Also, the ebook versions have the wrong date on them, don’t worry, that’ll get fixed!) I have no idea yet where I’ll tour for this book, but if you want me to come to your city, the best way to make that happen is to lobby your local bookstore or library to bring me there!

Other fun announcements:

• I’m a spokesperson this year for the Happily Ever After campaign for Vow For Girls. The goal of Vow for Girls is to end child marriage around the world, and the romance community is coming together again to help with this campaign in February. And this year, from mid February to mid April, they’re winning a sweepstakes, with a very cool grand prize: a trip to Napa Valley (with tastings at some great wineries, too)! But not only that, there are weekly flash prizes every single week of the campaign, all you have to do is donate that week. And you all, my newsletter subscribers, get an early tip that the flash prize for the very first week of the campaign is one I donated, so get ready! The campaign kicks off on February 13th, so click that link above to get involved and get alerts, and I’ll also post more about it on my social media.

• I was on The Stacks podcast this week! And in a few weeks I’ll be back on to discuss Indigo by Beverly Jenkins, please join us! Listen wherever you get your podcasts!

• For Bay Area locals: I’m doing a fun event on Wednesday with Wild 94.9! Please join us!

• Also for Bay Area locals: I’m moderating a panel on Thursday with a bunch of other Bay Area authors: Sophie Wan, Mara Williams, and Taleen Voskuni! Please come!

I had ankle surgery in November (right after getting back from a flurry of book travel; I scheduled it that way which...felt like a good idea at the time). I have a handful of product recommendations for things that made my life easier during recovery:

• These Vuori pants — they say straight leg, but are a very loose straight leg, so they worked over my splint and my boot, and were just so so comfortable. I treated myself to them right before surgery and I’m about to buy a second pair, because I’ve basically lived in them for the past few months. Size down on these.

• These big ice packs — so so helpful during the weeks where I was icing constantly!

• This Athleta hoodie — I own three of these and I just ordered a fourth; they’re so cozy, especially when you need a little comforting, and the pocket on the front made it easier to carry stuff around when I was in a knee scooter or on crutches.

• Dieux moisturizer — I completely abandoned my moderately elaborate skincare routine while I was recovering and just slapped this on my skin morning and night and it was perfect, easy to carry around with me, and great for dry skin during the winter months.

• Jordan Samuelson Skin lip balm — I had one of these next to my bed at all times; I am a lip balm obsessive and this is my favorite one.

• Compression socks — Good for many things, not just surgery recovery (I always wear them on long flights, so I have a bunch). I have pairs from Comrad and Wellow and they’re both great (and work for wide calves!).

• Kizik sneakers — I’ve only worn sneakers for the past month, and these are so easy to get in and out of. I need another pair of these two, because they’re my dog park shoes and they’re very muddy now, but they’re still in good shape.

• Charlotte Stone sneakers — These are currently my “nice” shoes; the velcro makes them easy for my bad ankle, and they’re cute enough that I don’t mind as much that I am only wearing sneakers.

• These watercolor booklets — They were so lovely for helping pass the time when I was basically in bed or on the couch for 23 hours out of every 24. It was nice to do something creative during that frustrating time. (I got the fruit one and a few of the flower ones).

• The Calm app: I slept terribly in the first few weeks after surgery, and I was even more grateful for the Calm app than I already usually am. I listen to the sleep stories almost every night to fall asleep, and they helped relax me when I was tense and sleepless from meds and worry and lack of activity.

• Please know that I feel like a big failure as a reader and an author that I don’t have a long list of books to recommend that I read while recovering. I was so grumpy and feeling so off that I’m not sure if I read a single new book in those first few weeks, and just reread a whole bunch of my favorite mystery novels (I definitely reread most of the Ruth Galloway books and the Right Sort of Man books — those links are to the first in each series) and my favorite historical romance novels (I reread the entire Mary Balogh Slightly series, this one is my favorite but they’re all great). I also fell in love with The Great Pottery Throwdown during this time (if you’re a Great British Bake Off fan, you’ll love this show too; it really hits its stride during the third season, I think).

I am doing a lot better now, thankfully! Also, free idea: the new thing I’m now going to bring to anyone post surgery or post having a baby etc. is a huge fresh vegetable platter with a variety of dips, and/or lots of washed and cut fruit. Those were things I craved and are labor intensive to put together yourself (and hard to ask someone else who is helping you out to do) and pretty difficult to order in. (I don’t know why I said “free idea” there — this whole newsletter is free ideas!)

Recipe time! I made these cookies a few weeks ago, when I was in the mood for an everyday, nominally healthy cookie, and I loved them so much that I’m going to make the dough for another batch of them tonight. (Even though my oven is currently broken, these cookies are so good that I’ll make them in tiny batches in my toaster oven). I made my favorite brown butter toffee chocolate chunk cookies ( I’ve linked t those in this newsletter before, they’re from Handle the Heat, they’re so good, and making the toffee is a delight!) over the holidays per a special request from my nephew, and so I was already thinking about brown butter cookies, so I googled around for a good oatmeal cookie that used brown butter and found this one. When I made them, I tossed in some of the leftover toffee from the above recipe, some toasted walnuts, and some golden raisins, because (controversial opinion here) I prefer oatmeal raisin cookies to oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, but these would be great with any add ons. They’re great with coffee in the morning as a breakfast cookie, tea in the afternoon for an afternoon snack, or anytime you want a little sweet treat. The original recipe has you make them into large cookies, but I tend to prefer a smaller cookie, so I made relatively small scoops (I used this cookie scoop for these and slightly underfilled the scoop) to scoop out the dough.

Brown Butter Oatmeal Cookies

1 cup (220 g or 2 sticks) unsalted butter, browned to make 3/4 cup or 160g*
1 cup (200 g) light or dark brown sugar, packed
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups (200g) all purpose flour
2 cups (175 g) old fashioned rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon**
1 cup raisins, chocolate chips or chunks, toffee, and/or chopped nuts (optional)

*I love when recipes that call for browned butter tell you how much browned butter you should use in the end; so often they just tell you how much butter to brown! Also, if you’ve never browned butter before, the link to the original blog post for this recipe, as well as the link to the Handle the Heat recipe walk you through how to do it. It’s not hard, you just have to watch the butter like a hawk at the end!

**The original recipe didn’t call for cinnamon but I love cinnamon in an oatmeal cookie recipe so I added it, if you don’t like it you don’t have to add it. Cardamom is also great in oatmeal cookie recipes

Directions:

Brown the butter and let it cool. There’s much more detail on browning butter in the links above, but basically, put the butter in a pot (ideally one with a light interior), let it melt, foam up, let the foam subside, then bubble up again, and soon after that there will be little brown bits in the pot, and the butter will smell nice and nutty. At that point, take it off the heat and pour it into a measuring cup or a bowl to cool. This is different from the original recipe, but at this point I mix together the butter and the brown sugar, and let them cool together.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, oats, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon (or other spice) if using. In larger bowl, whisk together the brown butter (once cool!), the brown sugar if you haven’t already mixed it in, the eggs, and vanilla. Once mixed together, add the dry ingredients and stir a few times, then (before it’s all totally mixed in) add any other additions (raisins, nuts, chocolate, etc) and stir until you can no longer see the flour.

Scoop the cookies out with a cookie scoop or large spoon and put them on a parchment paper covered baking tray, and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes and up to a few days (if you’re leaving them for more than 30 minutes, wrap them in plastic wrap first). I find it vastly easier to scoop out the cookies at this stage instead of putting all of the dough in the fridge in a bowl; it takes up more room in the fridge, but then you’re not trying to scoop hard cookie dough (and then when you’re ready to bake the cookies you can just toss them on cookie sheets and slide them in the oven).

When you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 F. If you made big cookies, bake them for 12-14 minutes; if you made smaller ones, bake them for 10-12 minutes (mine took the longer of that time).

Let cool and enjoy!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

xo

Jasmine

(Some of the links above are affiliate links, but I only recommend things that I truly love!)