Show, Don't Tell

I've been having some disagreements with my web editor over the editing of my pieces. After some back and forth, I have asked them not to edit the pieces that I send them. My web editor who seems to be a decent, conscientious, professional guy sent me this today.

I am sorry to inform you that I am unable to publish any unedited content on the website and you have agreed and signed the HDN blogger agreement giving us permission to edit your pieces. It is not open to discussion and we cannot make any exceptions.

So here is some of the edited content that they can publish.


Thursday evening, pop music diva Madonna was on stage in Istanbul. Some had waited for weeks, some for months or even years and finally she came back to Turkey after 19 years with a crew of 200 people, 3 planes and 45 trucks. I was one of the lucky 55,000 people to see this event. I can easily say that those missed the event, also missed out on some valuable time.


- Madonna In İstanbul


http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/madonna-in-istanbul.aspx?pageID=500&eid=89


_____________________________________________________________________________


Fish are of course more than a paragraph of encyclopedia information. But you cannot deny the help of an encyclopedia when you are looking for accurate and simple information. You will need to think deeply though if you want to learn and use the image of “fish.” Thanks to the art of metaphor, in cinema and literature fish have often been used as a symbol of captivitiy, despair, and “no escape.” If you are portraying freedom, you are lucky, you have “birds” in the catalogue, but the ones who are not that optimistic will need to look at the fish.


- Fish in the bowl


http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/fish-in-the-bowl.aspx?pageID=500&eid=86


________________________________________________________________________________


I can’t remember exactly what age I was when I had full sex. I don’t remember the date but I remember the settings. It was at a friend’s home, at a couch bed. I must have been 20 or 21 or 22. I had to go to work the next day and I thought whoever saw me next morning would immediately understand that I’d had sex the night before. Well, it didn’t happen that way. Nobody understood anything or would have cared even if they did. That looked like a big deal for me at that time but it wasn’t. Life went on as usual. Everything looked OK. I assume it must have been the correct age.



- What is the correct age to start sex?


http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/what-is-the-correct-age-to-start-sex-.aspx?pageID=500&eid=5


_________________________________________________________________________




Initially, let me begin with the usual difference, which is labor. In the south of Italy people work differently from northerners. It is obvious that southern Italians do not work as much as the notherners. Southerners have a break between 1:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. in a work day. They call this break “siesta.” They see the "siesta" time as the only time to stop their frenetic life. But on the contrary, northern Italians work very hard. They work for long hours and we can say that the north is the propellent power of Italy in a way.

- Italy - divided country

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/italy---divided-country.aspx?pageID=500&eid=91
________________________________________________________________________

And here is a pull quote from this page:

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/Default.aspx?pageID=499&p=2

This is another traditional Turkish food which is not so easy to make. You need really talented hands to make these balls.

_______________________________________________________________________

I invite you to read each piece because I haven't even gotten into the other issues I have with the writers. All I can say is, don't you have other things to do than to edit my work?

You can read my pieces here:

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/alba-brunetti.aspx?pageID=499&wid=15

Get A Move On, Girl

I'll be moving from my beautiful, rambling place in Galata to a cozy one bedroom (or 1 + 1 as we say here in İstanbul.) I am so excited to be moving into my own space. I am feeling all the energy of renewal. I'll eat right, I'll exercise, I'll work on all the projects that I want to work on.

This morning as I walked to the library, two of my characters came to talk to me. They are impatient, they want to live their love story, they want to live their lives, they want you to know them and why they are important. They want to be. Just yesterday I discovered my female character's name. I could see everything about her as a young woman and as an old woman, but her name eluded me. I couldn't even ask her as she wandered around her dark house, opened the door and let the narrator into her shop because I hadn't settled into the quiet of hearing her, of being with her. And I need quiet and alone time to be with them. My characters are not impatient with me - they are just exploding in front of me, their pasts, their present, their future. I know everything about them, I just need to settle down into writing about them. They've been waiting a long time - more than a year - just waiting for me to open the door and say, welcome.

They began as a short story called "Write It In Your Own Hand," but for the first time in my writing life my characters said, "We're bigger than this." "There's more." "There's a lot." "We're a book." "All of us." The whole family came and they were all talking at once. This was strange to me because my short stories are usually short, my characters self contained and all of the action is in the interior landscape. And Kemal said, "I married her out of duty." And the little boy said, "I want to be a writer." And Ayşe said, "It is all the same love." And I said, "What do I know about any of you?" And they kept coming back, the wife and the husband, the kids playing on the street, the woman who closes herself in a dark house for 20 years, the parents of the little boy - and they keep telling me everything.

Ok, I get it. Time to move - and move into a new routine. Time to write and not just about my characters. Time to be in a new place, in a new way and settle down into the things I love. Time to get a move on, right?

And She Lived Happily Ever After.

Let's begin here. There's a lot of my story that leads up to the title - and not all of it is what you would expect, and maybe none of it too. Some of the story I will share here on this blog, some of it will make its way into my other artistic projects and some of it I will tell you over tea overlooking the Bosphorus on sunny afternoons.

Oh, I may not tell you everything about me and what I think - a gal's gotta have some mystery, right? A little something to surprise you, to keep you a bit off balance, to make you laugh. Let's just say I'll share a part of me with you. Today's just the beginning - and there's a lot more to come.

I just want you to know that I am living happily ever after. And my soundtrack for today is: