I squeaked in some travel in the summer of 2021 that was really important. There’s a small part of Another Glass of Tea that’s set in the Turkish town of Datça on the Aegean coast. I’ve heard people talk about it, and seen photos of friends vacationing there. And for some reason I knew it had to be there. Another part takes place in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Kuzguncuk.

There was only one problem. I’d never actually been to either of those places.

So when Canada’s COVID numbers were declining at the same time Turkey’s were, and second vaccines were in arms, I took off to spend the last six weeks of my sabbatical in Turkey. And it was a good thing I did. 

Of course, there’s some latitude with fiction, but I wanted as many of the details of real places to be at least “close enough” so they don’t cause a distraction for readers.

I’d done most of the writing before my travel, but I’d had to make some pretty big assumptions. Some of them fortunately turned out to be true, but not all of them. I had one beautiful scene where my main character Fiona was gazing out over the Aegean Sea. I loved the words, the rhythm, the image they painted in my head. It all had to be scrapped when I learned you can’t actually see the sea from where she was meant to be, and in fact, the prevailing view is a string of huge windmills. Other details were updated or outright changed when I spent an afternoon wandering through Kuzguncuk.

Hopefully the details in the descriptions make Another Glass of Tea come to life for you.