Give yourself a big hug for making it through the week

Friends, I have a bunch to catch you up on! First, if you missed it, I was on Today with Hoda and Jenna last week! We talked about how I made my way to writing, dealing with rejection, and Party of Two! And I finally got to share the news that Hello Sunshine is developing The Wedding Date, The Proposal, and The Wedding Party for film! Yay! There are obviously no timelines yet, because this endless pandemic has many things on hold, but let’s all keep lobbying our local, state, and federal governments to do more to stop the spread of this disease and hopefully we can all go outside and fun things can happen again! Speaking of, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal about gin, where I also talked about loneliness and friendship and genocide and the Catholic church and some other stuff.

As you can probably tell if you read that WSJ piece, I’ve been having a real up and down time during the past five months. This is all so hard, for so many of us, and I think we’re all just trying to figure out how to keep going. As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Yoga With Adriene. I do a lot of her videos midday or in the evening, but lately I’ve been also trying to start the day with one of her quick morning videos, and in one of them, she says at one point “give yourself a big hug.” And you know, yes, sure, it feels cheesy and a little weird to do it, but in a time when I’m missing hugs a whole lot, it’s nice to do a little yoga and give yourself a big hug first thing in the morning. I know I need it.

If what you need is a great book to read, I have a great recommendation for a book to read this weekend! I loved A Taste of Sage, by Yaffa Santos; from the description I knew it was right up my alley — it’s about two chefs who fall in love through cooking! But the book itself lives up to what I wanted it to be and I loved the way she writes about food; I was hungry the entire time. And if you need a great book event to attend, I have some fun virtual events coming up! First, Saturday (tomorrow!) I’ll be on a Bookstore Romance Day panel through the fantastic Loyalty Bookstores with three other authors I adore: Andie J. Christopher, Tiff Marcelo, and Farrah Rochon! And then next Friday, the 21st, I’ll be doing this Writing Wisdom panel with Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Robert Jones Jr., and Sabaa Tahir though the Penguin Random House Book Your Summer Live two day event! We’ll be talking about our journeys to publication — I love talking about this with other authors because there are so many different ways people have gotten to where they are, and I think it’s so helpful for people who want to become published authors to see that, so please join us if you’re interested.

I have picked a whole bunch of zucchini out of my garden this week, and this weekend I’m going to make my favorite zucchini cake — I was just going to type up the recipe for you, then I remembered I’ve already done it, last year right around this time, so here it is! I would apologize for repeating this recipe, but it’s SO SO good that if you didn’t see it the first time, I want you to see it now — the first time I made it I think I made it again every week for a month. It’s from David Leibovitz, who recently reposted this recipe on his blog, so here’s that new link too. Oh, and sorry for the beans typo last time! I promise, there are no beans in this cake! I’m just glad it was a very obvious typo and not something major which looked sort of right.

Have a good weekend, everyone. Take care of yourselves.

Jasmine

Find me elsewhere! Facebook Instagram Twitter Bookshop
Buy The Wedding Date, The Proposal, The Wedding Party, Royal Holiday, and Party of Two!