Once Upon a Twilight!: Blog Tour: Never Always Sometimes by Adi Alsaid | Interview

Welcome to our stop on Never Always Sometimes tour for Adi Alsaid. This tour is hosted by The Fantastic Flying Book Club Tours.

Never Always Sometimes
Author: Adi Alsaid
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary
Released: August 4th 2015
Publisher: Harlequin Teen

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.

Interview

1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Born and raised in Mexico City to Israeli parents, I’m a movie buff, a basketball coach, and one of those people that posts too many food pics on Instagram.

2. What were your biggest challenges in writing Never Always Sometimes? I think that revisions focused mainly around making the characters feel as rounded out as possible, and that the choices they made feel true to their characters. There’s a POV shift halfway through the book, and Julia in her head was too at odds with how Julia had acted throughout, even if it was in Dave’s POV. The way I’d outlined her story before writing it was now at odds with the way she’d come alive on the page, and I had to go back and rework plot points and her voice. It took a few tries to really get it right, and I even had to throw out whole chapters and rewrite them entirely.

3. Were any of the characters in the book inspired by people from your real life? Dave is very loosely based on a college friend of mine (I took his physique, his last name, and a couple of his mannerisms), and Mr. Marroney is a complete cartoon of a math teacher I had in high school.

4. Do you talk to your characters while writing a story, to get into the mood? I don’t go that far, but I am constantly thinking about them, wondering what they would like/dislike, what they might say in a given situation. When I’m writing a story the characters are constantly in my mind, but I don’t quite take it to the point of having conversations with them.

5. What scene in the book are you most proud of, and why? Maybe the slam poetry scene. Because of math sex puns. Yeah, there are math sex puns in this book.

6. What is an unknown fact about Never Always Sometimes? Much like the places I wrote about in Let’s Get Lost, I’ve never spent much time in San Luis Obispo where the book is set. I’ve driven through a couple of times, and I lived a few hours north in Monterey for six months, so I know the general feel of the area, but many of the detailed locations are complete fabrications that you won’t find in SLO.

7. Describe your book in 5 words? Dave and Julia dislike clichés.

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.