There are two categories of writing that occupy our time and interest here at the beach on the Aegean Sea Coast of Turkey. The first is "the fiction category," which we hope will make us rich someday...
This year, our fiction slot has been filled by Habibullah at the Ottoman Court, a crime series set in the court of Süleyman the Magnificent, the mid-16th Century Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Habibullah, the eccentric detective hero, is a foreign-language translator for the Sultan's Imperial Council.
However, we also dedicate a portion of our writing lives to non-fiction, which helps, now and then, to pay for our harmless extravagances. The non-fiction category includes travel brochure and language-related writing in English, or Turkish, or both. My wife, Perihan -- who, besides being joint creator, leads me, sometimes forcibly, through the more thorny thickets of Turkish -- is my collaborator in this work.
With an eye towards drumming up more non-fiction business (and in hopes of finding a publisher for our own Turkish Language Guide and books), we developed and sponsor the MSNBC award-winning "The Learning Practical Turkish" website. The LPT website is intended for language lovers who like their lessons with a little bit of sugar, to help make the medicine go down.
Just before we embarked on a three-month U.S. vacation in 1998, the website paid off when Lonely Planet Publications contacted us to collaborate on a Turkish Language Phrasebook.
Lonely Planet Publications, you ask? LP, as it's fondly known, publishes tourist guides and language phrasebooks for most of the countries you or I would ever care to visit -- and some we wouldn't. And LP Guides and Phrasebooks are, well, jazzy. They even warn you of 'problems' you may encounter. For example, the LP Guide to Turkey warns the traveler to beware of obnoxious carpet hucksters near the Selçuk bus station during the height of the summer tourist season. Now, we live 25 minutes from Selçuk, and, by God, it's true: those hucksters are nuisances. Whenever we have to go to Selçuk during the summer tourist season, we give that location a wide berth!
Anyway, Sally Steward, the Lonely Planet's Publishing Manager in Australia at the time, visited our website in April '98 and left us an enticing e-mail message.
Dear Webmaster, I am looking for a suitably qualified author or team of authors to work on a new edition of our popular Turkish phrasebook. Please get back to me as soon as possible and we can discuss the details of our project. Regards, Sally Steward
Well, we were tickled. We'd been fans of the LP Guide to Turkey since we first saw it. (A dear friend had even favorably reviewed it on our website long before Sally ever contacted us). But, alas, after we had responded enthusiastically to Sally's message, LP's business plan changed and the deal fell through. So, a little disappointed -- but humbly gratified at having been considered in the first place by such a prestigious publishing house -- we went our separate ways.
Then, quite unexpectedly, 15 days before our U.S. vacation departure date, Sally contacted us again by e-mail, and the deal was back on! But, how were we going to manage a book and a vacation across 3 continents, at the same time...?
[Click following to see what happened next, during The Summer of '98.]
Jim and (co-author) Perihan Masters are a husband and wife team, living on the Aegean Coast of Turkey just 50 miles south of Izmir. Jim was born in Shanghai, China -- of American military parentage. Peri was born on the Black Sea coast of Turkey near Trabzon, of Turkish military parentage...Enticed by a Financial Times advertisement, Jim joined a NATO sponsored enterprise in Ankara in 1974 where he met the beautiful and brainy Perihan, a rising young Turkish banking executive. Settled now in the heart of what was once the ancient Ionian Empire -- the couple live an idyllic life by the sea.. writing, drawing and painting, teaching English, and providing computing service support to local businesses. They also sponsor the MSNBC award-winning Learning Practical Turkish Website which has built an enthusiastic international following of devoted Turkophiles and inquisitive language students of all ages.
[tags]wrting, book, language book, on the road, while traveling, remote location writing, travel[/tags]
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