FFBC: Welcome to the club, Never Always Sometimes by Adi Alsaid

Never Always Sometimes
by Adi Alsaid
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Release Date: August 4th 2015
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary, Realistic Fiction

Synopsis:

Never date your best friend 

Always be original 

Sometimes rules are meant to be broken 

Best friends Dave and Julia were determined to never be cliché high school kids—the ones who sit at the same lunch table every day, dissecting the drama from homeroom and plotting their campaigns for prom king and queen. They even wrote their own Never List of everything they vowed they'd never, ever do in high school. 

Some of the rules have been easy to follow, like #5, never die your hair a color of the rainbow, or #7, never hook up with a teacher. But Dave has a secret: he's broken rule #8, never pine silently after someone for the entirety of high school. It's either that or break rule #10, never date your best friend. Dave has loved Julia for as long as he can remember. 

Julia is beautiful, wild and impetuous. So when she suggests they do every Never on the list, Dave is happy to play along. He even dyes his hair an unfortunate shade of green. It starts as a joke, but then a funny thing happens: Dave and Julia discover that by skipping the clichés, they've actually been missing out on high school. And maybe even on love.

HOW DO I ANSWER THIS? I’ll say Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, but I hope you know I’m going to lose a lot of sleep wishing I could answer this a million different times.

I’d say I go through phases. Pushing Daisies is up there.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 

THESE QUESTIONS ARE SO HARD. “No Children” by The Mountain Goats. 

I’m going to cheat and say a whole category: Asian soups. 

Hmm. Let’s say Night Vale from the Welcome to Night Vale podcast. The version of Seattle in The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton. And the cartoon world of Looney Tunes.

I hate to be repetitive, but I might have to go with Chuck from Pushing Daisies. 

“An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain."- The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup, Susan Orlean.

Is undead an option? I’d love to meet Stephen King as a zombie. Cause, like, if he’s creepy now, imagine after he’s experienced death.

A trick I learned to making the perfect grilled cheese sandwich is that you butter up and grill the inside of the bread first before putting the cheese in for extra meltiness AND extra crunch. You’re welcome.

Hello Adi! We are super excited to have you in our FFBC tours.

Of course! The book is about Dave and Julia, two best friends who’ve distanced themselves from others throughout high school, existing in their little world of two. They even went so far as creating The Nevers; a list of clichés they promised themselves never to do. When graduation approaches and they re-discover the list, they decide to burst their little bubble and try to cross out every cliché they swore off. Dave, however, is already guilty of number seven on the list: Never pine silently for someone for all of high school.

I want to call them smart and funny, but that would be totally self-absorbed and patting myself on the back, right? Julia has always been the driving force of the friendship, and she’s the one that insulates them from their high school classmates and eventually leads them back to explore the outside world. She idolizes her biological mom, who gave her up for adoption at birth and now roams the world being a very hip person. Dave, on the other hand, lost his mom as a kid, and now has a strained relationship with his dad and older brother Brett. 

Did you find inspiration in any other story/movie/show and how has this affected your writing? I think high school is such a struggle between finding out who you are and how you fit into the world around you. You want to be original and unique, but you also want to connect with others, be liked. I wanted to tell a story that was different than what I wrote in Let’s Get Lost, something that zoomed into two friends and what happens in their relationship when they change the rules of how to interact with the world around them.

I was already writing the story when I watched the movie Drinking Buddies, and that definitely had some influence in how I approached the arc of the best-friend love story, because I thought the movie handled it without a single cliché.

My favorite aspect of the book might be the one-liners and banter between Dave and Julia, so I’ll pick one of those, mostly out of context.

Dave: “I’m sure that’s an exaggeration.”

Julia: “Dave, you know I swore off hyperbole a thousand years ago.”

I was really proud of myself while writing the slam poetry scene. It’s full of ridiculous puns and I was being a weirdo and giggling to myself while writing it.

Not particularly. Male or female, I’m always trying to make sure a character feels well-rounded and like a whole person. I pay particular attention to this during revisions, but it’s just as true for male characters as for female ones.

“That Teenage Feeling” by Neko Case.

It’d be so awesome. I’m a huge film buff so I’d be delighted to see my story in a theater. I know this is a ridiculous answer, especially when I write mostly teen characters, but I’d love to see a movie where Nic Cage plays every single role. So, why not in my movie? (Okay, there are a million reasons why not. I’d make an awful casting director. Or the best one.)

I’ve got a number of projects in the works! Nothing I can officially talk about at this time, unfortunately, but maybe soon.

Thank you so much for everything, Adi! 

Thank you for having me!

Follow the Never Always Sometimes by Adi Alsaid Blog Tour and don't miss anything! Click on the banner to see the tour schedule.

Adi Alsaid was born and raised in Mexico City, then studied at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. While in class, he mostly read fiction and continuously failed to fill out crossword puzzles, so it's no surprise that after graduating, he did not go into business world but rather packed up his apartment into his car and escaped to the California coastline to become a writer. He's now back in his hometown, where he writes, coaches high school and elementary basketball, and has perfected the art of making every dish he eats or cooks as spicy as possible. In addition to Mexico, he's lived in Tel Aviv, Las Vegas, and Monterey, California. A tingly feeling in his feet tells him more places will eventually be added to the list. Let's Get Lost is his YA debut.

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FFBC: Welcome to the club, Most Likely to Succeed (Superlatives #3) by Jennifer Echols

Most Likely to Succeed (Superlatives #3)
by Jennifer Echols
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Release Date: August 4th 2015

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Realistic Fiction

Synopsis:

In this sexy conclusion to The Superlatives trilogy from Endless Summer author Jennifer Echols, Sawyer and Kaye might just be perfect for each other—if only they could admit it.

As vice president of Student Council, Kaye knows the importance of keeping order. Not only in school, but in her personal life. Which is why she and her boyfriend, Aidan, already have their lives mapped out: attend Columbia University together, pursue banking careers, and eventually get married. Everything Kaye has accomplished in high school—student government, cheerleading, stellar grades—has been in preparation for that future.

To his entire class, Sawyer is an irreverent bad boy. His antics on the field as school mascot and his love of partying have earned him total slacker status. But while he and Kaye appear to be opposites on every level, fate—and their friends—keep conspiring to throw them together. Perhaps the seniors see the simmering attraction Kaye and Sawyer are unwilling to acknowledge to themselves…

As the year unfolds, Kaye begins to realize her ideal life is not what she thought. And Sawyer decides it’s finally time to let down the facade and show everyone who he really is. Is a relationship between them most likely to succeed—or will it be their favorite mistake?

Kaye and Sawyer are that couple you know from school who are complete opposites—he’s a bad boy and she’s buttoned up—yet they’ve flirted with each other for years. Now they’ve found out that their friends actually think they’d make a great couple, and they take this idea for a wild test drive.

Writing Biggest Flirts (#1) was a party because I was just starting out and could go in any direction I wanted, theoretically. They got harder from there.

I definitely found the series harder, for precisely the reason Biggest Flirts was so fun to write. Once you’ve established your worldbuilding in the first book, you have to stick to that in the following books, and that necessarily shuts down some of your choices.

What I love about Kaye is that she is genuinely eager to change and experiment with where her life is going by the end of the book. That takes a lot of guts, and she finds that in herself along the way.

What I love about Sawyer as a character is NOT something I would love about him in real life. It would drive me crazy. But he actually often does the opposite of what I’d predict he would do if I were his friend. He kept surprising even me, and I wrote him!

Wow, that is a really hard question. I love them all for different reasons. The party girl of the heroines is Tia from Biggest Flirts, and she is my favorite—probably because she is so unlike me. Harper is introverted and gets absorbed in her creative pursuits like me, and Kaye is a brainiac who feels like a failure like me (my high school actually voted me Most Likely to Succeed, which I found astonishing), so writing them was just writing different aspects of myself. As for the guys, Brody is darling and I think most readers will love Sawyer, but I have a soft spot for Will. I guess I really thought a lot about what I was putting him through as a character, and I felt kind of bad about it because he is, as Tia says, the nicest guy ever.

“Always Summer” by Yellowcard was the last song on the playlist that I listened to over and over while writing the book. (I make a soundtrack for every book.) As I interpret the song, it’s about a guy who’s in a position a lot like Sawyer’s. He has been successful in starting his life over, and he’s astonished at how his friends, especially Kaye, welcome him and love him. And the lyrics repeated over and over could be Sawyer talking directly to Kaye: “I loved you first. I love you still. I always will.”

I think she’s in a really difficult situation, as are all teenagers about to graduate from high school, and that’s why I find this age so fascinating to write about. You are making decisions about school and career—and sometimes, relationships—that will affect the rest of your life, yet you really don’t have enough experience to make those decisions. All you can do is make an educated guess about the right path for you. And that’s the key to my advice. You don’t know if you will change your mind in a year about the college major you had your heart set on for years and years (I did). But you can research colleges and make sure there are quite a few options at each college you apply to that interest you, not just one. You don’t know if you’ll actually enjoy the career you have your heart set on until you're doing it. But you can get a taste of it by doing an internship—you’ll probably figure out if this would actually be a job you’d hate (This happened to my roommate.) You can make assumptions and go by what your friends have told you or what your parents want you to do. You can also, in this day and age, really research possible paths for your future so that you’re not, for instance, majoring in business at Columbia because your mother did and this will make her proud. Your mom can’t live your life, and she isn’t you.

Sawyer and Kaye in this book are my favorite because this romance has been building for years (and three books!) and they have waited a long time for this.

My critique partner, Victoria Dahl—you would think I would not have to buy my own critique partner’s books but you would think wrong because Tia is partially based on her and Tia doesn’t remember or get around to stuff like that, right? YA author Rosemary Clement-Moore. Adult romantic comedy author Jennifer Cruisie--I’ve been heartbroken that she hasn’t come out with anything new in a while.

A little sci-fi for variety—a fabulously creative and hilarious read, Redshirts by John Scalzi.

I’m really not sure. My editors have all left my publisher—it’s common for them to switch around among the big publishing houses. Authors call this being “orphaned.” So I’m just writing the book I want to read and hoping my agent can sell it somewhere, and I can start over.

Follow the Most Likely to Succeed by Jennifer Echols Blog Tour and don't miss anything! Click on the banner to see the tour schedule.

Jennifer Echols was born in Atlanta and grew up in a small town on a beautiful lake in Alabama—a setting that has inspired many of her books. She has written nine romantic novels for young adults, including the comedy MAJOR CRUSH, which won the National Readers’ Choice Award, and the drama GOING TOO FAR, which was a finalist in the RITA, the National Readers’ Choice Award, and the Book Buyer’s Best, and was nominated by the American Library Association as a Best Book for Young Adults. Simon & Schuster will debut her adult romance novels in 2013, with many more teen novels scheduled for the next few years. She lives in Birmingham with her husband and her son.

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If the winner has one of the Superlatives book, he/she can choose another book instead written by Jennifer Echols.

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