Mark your calendars...

I'm very excited to announce that my next book, The Sound of Language, will be on sale on 26 December 2007. You can pre-order the book at Amazon.com now!

What's the book about?

Every language has a sound. Try hearing a language you don’t have any clue about and it has a sound. Some sound like music, others like stones rattling in a steel container and some others like the buzzing of bees.

When I first moved to Denmark, that’s how Danish sounded to me, like the buzzing of bees. In Scandinavia, Danish is the hardest language to learn because it’s the hardest language to understand. People speak as if they have a hot potato in their mouth. They randomly shorten words and make four words into one sound. Now that I understand some Danish, the buzzing has lessened, but it’s still there when people speak too quickly or they’re speaking with a heavy Northern Jylland accent.

The Sound of Language is my first book set in Denmark and is the story of an Afghan refugee Raihana, who has recently come to Denmark, just a few months before 9/11. But this is not a 9/11 novel.

In Denmark, refugees get monetary support from the government and in return, they are obligated to take Danish classes and participate in what is called praktik. They have to work 20 hours a week in some place where the use Danish at the workplace. This is done so that they get integrated into Danish society quickly and efficiently.

Usually refugees cluster together and speak in their native language as they clean supermarkets or do other jobs of the same nature for their praktik. But Raihana finds a praktik with a beekeeper, Gunnar.

Recently widowed, Gunnar is an unhappy man. He and his wife had loved their bees and now Gunnar ignores them, uncaring that they’ll die if he doesn’t pay them attention. He’s resistant to have Raihana work for him at first, but slowly she worms his way into his life and helps resurrects his love for bees and life. Gunnar in return makes Raihana leave her past behind and embrace her future.

This is not a love story. I had thought it would be but it didn’t work out that way. This is a story about a unique friendship between two people who cannot communicate clearly with each other because they don’t speak the same language. This is a story about immigrant life in Denmark. And most importantly, this is a story of courage and of stepping beyond the confines laid down by society and culture and finding something precious and important – happiness.

There is so much fiction out there about the Taliban and the people who suffered under them, I just wanted to see what happened to an Afghan who escaped and came to a Western country as a refugee. This was a wonderful journey for me and I hope that you’ll enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Goodbye, Miss Snark and good work!

I have some very sad news. Yesterday, was the last day of the funny and ridiculous blog by Miss Snark, the literary agent. For all of you there who need advice on what to do, you can always still search the archives of the blog, but you cannot send an email and get a quirky and heartfelt response.

The blog will still continue to be up, but Miss Snark will turn off comments by the end of the week.

So, all the questions you want to ask me about finding an agent, getting published et cetera et cetera, please go straight to http://misssnark.blogspot.com/.

I'm going to miss Miss Snark. Sigh!

Fear of flying

I'm afraid of flying. It's not a full-blown phobia and I'm not sitting inside the plane screaming like John Lithgow because I can see monsters on the wings of the airplane—but I'm scared. I kiss my boys extra hard before I leave and I make sure my husband knows to tell them that mama loved them very, very much, in case I don't make it back home.

It's worse when my husband flies. He has to call or send an SMS as soon as he lands, which he does because he loves me and likes his head. I don't know when this fear came into existence, but now it feels like it has always been there. But then I'm getting kookier as I get older. Since I'm only 32, I don't think people are going to want to talk to me by the time I hit 60.

I had thought that the iPod, which as you all know I love, would help—but fact remains that as much as I love the iPod, when I'm flying I want to read a book. I want to hold a book, read it, let it slide on my lap as I fall asleep.

On a recent trip to Switzerland I did the usual airport book shopping. I love airport book shopping—I get to buy some guilty pleasures and some books that I never thought to read except because I get two books for just 220 kroner (which is quite a bargain) and randomly pick up the second book.

This time I bought The Boleyn Inheritance and some bad mystery novel about a detective and people kidnapping pregnant women, stealing their babies and killing them. As most of you know, I'm an honest-to-god Tudor history fan and absolutely love most of Phillipa Gregory's books, but I must say The Virgin's Lover and The Constant Princess were boring. I couldn't even get through The Constant Princess—maybe I just don't find the pious Katherine of Aragon that interesting or maybe using letters to tell the story just didn’t do it for me.

I finished The Boleyn Inheritance during my trip—it was really, really good. Written from the POVs of Jane Boleyn (Anne Boleyn's brother's widow who was a little nutso), Anne of Cleves (the one who escaped) and Catherine Howard (the 16-year old twit who lost her head because Henry was such a jerk), the book is wonderful, poignant and touching. Even though I know the story, I still feel a jolt of sorrow for that young, young Catherine howard who had had no choice but to marry the lustful Henry (who was old enough to be her grandfather) and had been beheaded because she fell in love with a boy her age.

I loved learning more about Anne of Cleves, because she I always felt that she was a smart cookie—she managed to not lose her head and live an independent life, especially after Henry died. I have read about Katherine Parr in history books and I like her until she marries that terrible child molester, Thomas Seymour. (If you know nothing about Tudor history, I'm sorry because I imagine that this post makes no sense to you.)

So, I heartily recommend The Boleyn Inheritance—a sad but wonderfully written novel. And thanks to it I didn't even once think about crashing planes until after we had landed. Are you afraid of flying? How do you control your fear besides taking a big bus around the world like Maya Angelou?