More Touring and Other Miscellany

I think I might have overstuffed my brain with political blogs, newsfeeds, online commentary and anything election-ralated.

And my brain wants no more of it.

Then again, as Larry David recently blogged about at the HufPo (I told you my blog-surfing is out of control), I think all this over-exposure to information has gotten me so pumped (in a bad way) and jittery, I think I might just spontaneous combust the night of November 4th before they even announce the results.

And I’m not even American!

So, like a listless junkie waiting in a comatose state for her next hit, I have been too paralyzed by inertia and this constant blog-surfing to do any blogging of my own – and this when I have a book out! And when I’ve just recently been touring by some amazing fellow writers and friends!
Amazing. Just goes to show how such a torrent of information available to us in a constant, never-ending stream, can be so utterly paralyzing.

Well, I’m taking a break from the doom and gloom of the news cycle to bring you highlights of my latest interviews, and also to announce that my new favorite word is Schadenfreude.
(I didn’t even need to Spellcheck that. That’s how much I love this word.)

In case you’re like me and first heard “Schadenfreude” used sometime around the first of the Wall St. giants collapsed, and haven’t stopped seeing it everywhere since, “Schadenfreude” refers to feeling misplaced joy over other people’s misery. Or gloating. Something a whole lot of people have been indulging in lately.

Now for some of my favorite Q&As from my blog tour…

From Maggie Marr, who I had the pleasure of meeting in San Fran this year…

Q:What pulled you into this story, and as a writer made you think ‘I have to write this’?
A:My books tend to reflect whatever issues are haunting me at a given point in time, the problems I’m noticing people around me are facing. With Cutting Loose, I didn’t have much choice with the launching point since I knew it would be a spin-off of my first novel, Fashionably Late, that picks up Ranya’s story. Ranya for me represents the whole subset of girls that Jane Austen might have described as ‘silly’ and who we still see plenty of, whether it’s on those Girls Gone Wild videos here in North America, or these idle, wealthy, sheltered women in the Middle East who don’t seem to care about very much. It was challenging to make Ranya sympathetic, so I made her funny and self-reflective. The only way to put up with a snob is if that snob had a sense of humor! But when it came to the rest of the story, I was very driven by taking familiar stereotypes and turning them on their ear – Rio, the editor-in-chief of a Latina magazine, has a one-woman vendetta against the waif-ish, homogenous cast of most fashion magazines, Zahra is a Palestinian Christian from Bethlehem, possibly from one of the oldest Christian families in the world, and the boys are from a fifth-generation Lebanese-American family based loosely on the Maloufs of New Mexico, self-made multi-millionaires who own the Palms casino in Vegas, an entertainment channel, some sports team… Lebanese and Syrian immigrants also played their part in American frontier legend, and we don’t get to hear their rags-to-riches story often. The story Georges tells Ranya about how his family came to America and built their fortune is a historically accurate account. I feel that the story of each and every character in Cutting Loose is a thread in the tapestry that is North American culture.

And this great question from my friend Marilyn Brant, whose ARC I am awaiting any day now…

Q:What’s a personality trait you love about one of the characters in your novel and why?

A:Hmm… this is a trait that both Rio and Zahra share throughout the novel, and that Ranya struggles with – resiliency. Rio and Zahra take a lot of serious punches, both throughout the plot development and behind the scenes, and they keep rolling with them one way or another. They may not always respond in ways we like, but when we meet them, we can imagine they’re already done some serious growing up which has left them scarred: Zahra is the only daughter out of five offspring who had the chance to escape a life of destitution in Bethlehem, in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. She’s now carrying the burden of supporting this family she left behind, which is the fate of so many immigrants in this world. Rio hasn’t had it much easier – taunted with the label of ‘illegal’ just because of the way she looks and the language she speaks, and this in spite of being a perfectly legal citizen of the United States. I find a recent study about the decrease of illegal immigration to the US very interesting – the stats did not go down because of better detection or deportation methods, but because the US is no longer an attractive beacon for employment. Hoarding doesn’t pay in the long run folks – sharing and empathy has a way of paying dividends while xenophobia does just the opposite.

Resiliency is just another way of saying “growing up” for me, and I admire both Rio and Zahra for it, and so does Ranya, as a matter of fact!

And this little bit of escapist fantasy, courtesy of Saralee Rosenberg:

Q: If you could get a rave review in “People” magazine, what would you want it to say about Cutting Loose?

A:“Hugely entertaining… file this one under ‘thinking’ beach reads… Dajani’s sparkling prose takes you from the boudoirs of petro-dollar heiresses to the Miami offices of Sueltate where sexual tension spills over from the pages of this Latin glossy to the lives of the cast of colorful characters who run the magazine, from the garbage-lined streets of a Honduran shantytown to despair in the Palestinian Occupied Territories… readers won’t know where fantasy ends and gritty realism begins.”

And finally, I’ll leave you with a little story about my 11-year-old self, courtesy of a question on Ellen Meister’s blog:

Q:What do you think readers might be surprised to know about you?

A: When I was eleven, I called the publishers of my favorite line if YA books (La Courte Echelle… it’s a Montreal-based line) and asked if they’d consider publishing a book by an eleven-year old. I can’t believe my 11-year-old self actually had the cojones to look up the number in the yellow pages and boldly ask if she could do this. By then I’d had a few writing recognitions at school and was confident enough about my writing that when I would read these hilarious YA novels, I would think: I can so do this!

Too bad I never finished that “novel” I was working on at eleven … but it’s this same sentiment that made me pick up pen and paper again some 15 years later when I read “Confessions of a Shopaholic” and thought – dude, I could SO do this!!!

Wasn’t that fun?