ready to check in? YIN YANG LOVE SONG is out now!
plus: a timeline of how this book came to be + what I learned from writing it
Welcome to the Wildflower Inn, a heartbreak healing inn on Whidbey Island, Washington. Your room is ready.
aka today’s the day! Yin Yang Love Song is officially out now!!!
I’m so excited for you to join Chryssy, Vin, Leo, and the Aunties at the inn. This is my coziest book yet, with lots of food and healing and gentle moments.
The one-liner pitch: This book is about an herbalist and a cellist who fake date to boost their businesses.
This book is also about burnout, confronting perfectionism, and learning how to rewrite our own stories (with family, with our reputations, with ourselves, and in relationships). It’s about how what we lose when we take things at face value and simply believe what we’re told (by our family, by the media).
It’s about what happens when we believe we’re cursed. It’s about understanding the power that comes from taking our lives into our own hands and what we gain when we realize we can change our own minds at any time.
It’s about growth spurts and growing pains and blooming.
It’s about falling in love.
From a meet-cute at a $100,000+ celebrity party to midnight moon garden strolls to a Dragon Boat race to flower farm visits to a firefly concert, I hope this book makes you feel comforted and hopeful and happy. I hope it makes you laugh. There’s a chance it might even make you cry. There’s also a very real possibility it’ll hit a little too close to home (like it does for me).
Ultimately, I hope this book serves as a gentle reminder that rest is important, perfection is impossible, and just like flowers, you can bloom even when no one is watching.
A timeline
How Yin Yang Love Song came to be, getting personal with my learnings from writing it, and the photo that inspired “bad boy Yo-Yo Ma”
I’m really proud of this book. I didn’t experience the “Sophomore Slump” (a term writers use to describe how challenging the second book is to write). Instead, I had what I call the “Junior Slump.” There were so many times I questioned myself and really wasn’t sure if this book would be any good. I faced self-doubt, tricky plot questions, and tried to figure out how to break a curse while keeping it rooted in reality. The only ~*magic*~ that happens in this book is what happens between Chryssy and Vin and their love story. 😆 (Okay, and maybe the firefly scene, which I think is pretty magical.)
There’s a big difference between having the idea for something and knowing what you want it to feel like, and then capturing that *feeling* on the page. I so badly wanted to do this book justice. There were so many drafts of this book that the photo above doesn’t even begin to capture, and I went through four notebooks (I usually average 2-3).
Spoiler alert: I kept pushing through. Along the way, I learned a lot about writing—and myself—in the process. I grew a lot.
It’s pub day, but it was a journey to get here. To kick off where this story really starts, we have to go back to 2022…