How it all started…..
As this is the first news on my website, I thought I would tell you a little bit about my writing journey so far. I could start with the poem I wrote at primary school that was published in a magazine, or my script for Dick Whittington that was performed (with me in the starring role) in the village hall. But I don’t think we need to dwell on those! My attempts at writing a novel started about 20 years ago.
In my mid-twenties, I came to Mediterranean Turkey to spend a summer enjoying the sun and the relaxed lifestyle. They say if you drink water from the spring in our local town you won’t leave. Whether it was that I don’t know, but I never really went home and have now lived here for more than half my life.
This is a land full of mystery and legend. It is the place where the greedy King Midas wished that everything he touched would turn to gold and nearly starved as a result, where the Trojans were fooled by a wooden horse and Bellerophon flew on Pegasus to kill the fire-breathing Chimera. Alexander the Great is said to have entered the town where I live by disguising his soldiers as musicians and hiding their weapons in flute boxes!
It is also a land of history. The whole country is littered with the ruins of ancient civilisations, in this area mainly the remains of the Lycian people, who lived here from about 3000 years ago in city states filled with amphitheatres, baths, temples and numerous rock tombs. Much more recently, the population exchange that took place following the Turkish Independence War, when ethnic Greeks living on this coast were sent to Greece, turned the once-lively settlement of Kayaköy (Karmilassos in Greek) into a ‘ghost town’. This story is the basis of Louis de Bernieres’s wonderful book Birds Without Wings.
In addition, this part of Türkiye is stunningly beautiful with rugged mountains framing bays of crystal clear water, pine forests and wild oleander that scent the air and solid blue skies from May to October – and often in the winter too. With all these treasures around me, how could I fail to be inspired?
I started to write the Kismet Pension. Before I moved here, I had stayed at a village pension where the lady owner sat and gave orders – sometimes accompanied by her mother – while her meek husband ran around and did the work. It got me thinking about the challenges of being a strong woman in a society apparently dominated by men. The character of Fatma grew out of this encounter, although Fatma is a lot more hard-working and her husband both lazier and more handsome than the real-life version!
I wrote a book, and then I read about story structure and writing styles and I rewrote it and after several more drafts and edits, it became the Kismet Pension. And then, because I wanted to see if I could write another one or if that was the one book that I had in me (as they say), I spent a month alone in Ankara and planned and wrote most of my second book, Precious Things. This is set in London and quite different to The Kismet Pension, although they both have determined women as their main characters and share the themes of family and loyalty.
So I had written two books, but for a while I did nothing about it. I sent them to a few friends, tinkered with them and wrote short stories to keep myself occupied. I was scared to send them out into the world. Then I realised that I wanted to be able to tell people I was a writer and in order to do that, I needed to share my books. In the next news post, I’ll tell you what I have done since then.