I love September!
In Turkish, the word for September is Eylül, which comes from Arabic and refers to it being harvest time. I love this month because the vicious heat of summer finally changes to a pleasant warmth and the light changes from being harsh and invasive to being soft and glowing. Anyone working in the tourist industry begins to relax as they see the end of the season approaching and look forward to a reast. It is also the most popular month with visitors to the area and at our hotel, we enjoy seeing our regular guests, some of whom have been coming for more than twenty years!
Writing-wise, my beta readers came back to me with useful suggestions and corrections on the second Kismet book so I have been doing small edits on that. I also went through to check for overuse of certain words. I know I am a repeat offender with words like ‘still’ and ‘just’ and often when you go back and look, they don’t add anything to the sentence. ‘Just’ in particular, is so dispensable that there is no exact equivalent in Turkish (in phrases like ‘I’ve just done it’). If pushed, they use ‘new’ or ‘now’ (as in ‘I’ve done it now’).
One of my readers said she liked this second book even more than the first one and it was reassuring that to know that I might be able to keep writing things people want to read. I have also been in touch with the talented designer who did the cover for the first book and she is going to be working on the second one too – so it should be just as wonderful!
This month I visited Isparta, known as the City of Roses. Turkey is the second largest producer of rose oil and rose water in the world and most of this is in the Isparta region. The flowers are used in the cosmetics and perfume industries, and rose water is also used in cooking, to make desserts like ‘güllaç’ (gool-ach) and to flavour Turkish delight.
Isparta is also in the middle of the lake district of Turkey, which has some 50 natural crater lakes. The largest is Lake Eğirdir (482 sqkm, though still only the fourth biggest lake in Turkey). One of the most interesting is the 196m deep Lake Salda, whose magnesium rich rocks and clear water give it its incredible blue colour, as well as making it the closest match to some of the rocks on Mars. Studying these helped NASA’s scientists prepare for the 2020 Perseverance rover mission!
I have also been on some travels through the books I have read this month. Here are a couple:
The Three Graces – Amanda Craig
This is a story about so many things! The title refers to three elderly English ladies who live in a beautiful valley in Italy, but their lives and fortunes are being influenced by a dreadful, misogynistic husband who now has dementia, a distant son, a grandson’s wedding to an Instagram star who has her own demons, a group of refugees brought to the valley by people smugglers, local man Enzo who is desperate for news of his daughter in America, and a Russian oligarch fleeing from Putin. All the story lines come together to provide a satisfying ending; one review of it likened it to a Shakespearean marriage drama!
The Lost Lyra – Richard Clark
This book takes you on a trip to Crete (a place where I spent a lot of one summer) – as well as back in time to learn the history of the island. It follows Sarah as she comes to terms with the loss of her beloved Grandfather, learns to play the Cretan lyra that he left her and discovers his bravery as a young soldier when the island was invaded. Along the way, she also embraces a new future for herself, and the reader gets a wonderful glimpse of the landscape, culture and people of the Crete.
Welcome to autumn! (as I write this, we are having our first rain for four months!)
Melanie