Colum McCann On Writing & I Find Turkish Delights

 I McCann's Let the Great World Spin while in prison. I was quite taken with the novel, but never found time to read anything more from him. The Guardian interviewed him today, Colum McCann: ‘I like having my back against the wall’, and he had this to day about writing:

 You taught creative writing for a long time, and you’ve published a book of writing advice. If you were to boil it all down to one key point, what would it be?
I love this phrase by the novelist Aleksandar Hemon: “It’s all shit until it isn’t.” Which is really interesting, because it’s all about sitting down and working at the coalface and doing it again and again. It’s the refusal to give up, the refusal to let the story beat you. Every single book that I’ve ever written, I have given up. It’s almost like a necessary part of the process – you’ve got to cause yourself grief in order to understand what it is that it actually means to you.

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What do you need in order to write?

A perfect day would be getting up at 4am and, without checking the soccer results or my email, getting straight down to it. I’d stop to walk the dog and do a few chores, then go back to work until about midday. In the afternoon I’d do some editing, and then maybe have a glass of wine at about 4pm, meet a few pals. Then late in the evening I’d get a bit more editing done. That would be a perfect day for me.

Is that how it usually happens?
No, of course not [laughs].

 And about Turkish Delights. While I was writing this post, a notice came across my screen of an email from Gastro Obscura and its newsletter, having its subject "In defense of Turkish delight." Which reminded me of a detective story I read while in prison. It was Turkish, had an LGBTQ detective, and was the first time I had read of Turkish delights. There was a bit of double entendre in the mystery series adopting that name. I decided to google the book series. Which is how I found there were three published by Penguin Random House. The Wikipedia entry for the series, Hop-Çiki-Yaya, shows four, with the latest from 2012. I thought the one I read (which might have been the second book in the series) was a hoot. Looking at the search results, they are not as obscure as I thought they might be.

There is even a Wikipedia page for the author: Mehmet Murat Somer.

I need to get some work done, only eyes are tired.

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