Thanks for the reply ...<br /><br />I too look forward to working with you&nbsp; ... but I usually am not very trusting till I get to know the person&nbsp; ... and then, well trust must be earned&nbsp; ...&nbsp; Actually your questions does start to build trust&nbsp; ...so good beginning and thanks.<br /><br />(By the way ... this system of yours does not appear to have spell check&nbsp; ... and me being quite dyslexic ... forgive any and all errors that may appear here.<br /><br />In reply to your questions <br /><br />1) Comments on the email sections will be apprecated.&nbsp; As noted I myself have added bracketed areas to enhance and clairify the areas that would seem a bit confusing ... your additional comments on those areas, (both the original and added brackets)&nbsp;could add more clarification or adjustments ... so I am open to that.&nbsp; But we're in agreement that the emails stay untouched. <br /><br />2) The word I would choose (not to be too difficult) is not comic per say but homorous ... Often the situations that come about are" funny" in the sense that there are very odd coincidences and also social and cultural conflicts that lead to things bein humorous based on the conflicts rather than "comic relief" jokes, or slapstick ... The humor, I hope,&nbsp;is a bit more sophisticated than "comedy" (semantics?)&nbsp; Mostly I intended to underplay the obvious "off" situations ... and let them play out .... for exmaple you will find one situation where a Turk is getting his English language training from a Mormon, who is giving the young man a perception of America based solely on the religous Morman point of view&nbsp; ... saying all Americans act like Mormons.&nbsp; Another is when my great niece takes almost an hour to pick out a pair of shoes from a small shoe store in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul ... and how all of those there get frustated&nbsp; .. but the bottom line was there were no other customers in that hour ... Or the various responses we got&nbsp;to the two of us traveling together from Turks trying to figure out our relationship ... or by strange&nbsp;circomstances, meeting a man in the the far east of Turkey, who was a famous author (in a very limited circle)&nbsp;I had read a great deal&nbsp; ... and it turns out, I dated his sister in Seattle. <br /><br />So the humor is more situational ... than comic (although what happened as the airport on a few occasions comes close to traditionsal slapstick... <br /><br />3) The poltical responses are also intended to be explained in situational settings as well ... I mainly avoid the analysis that I could provide (as a well read and trained historian), but try and keep the dialogues I have with the Turks as the means of expressing the concerns, with me adding some "immidiate" reactions" ... with&nbsp;only a&nbsp;little introduction of future events (except in the new introduction) <br /><br />There are a few sections where I go into the extensive diversity that really exists in Turkey that most Westerners do no see nor understand.&nbsp; I do that mainly by reflecting over an event that happend in a major public square that is quite a popular shopping and social gathering place among the Turks. <br /><br />So ... if you knew me&nbsp; ... you would know I wrote this work with great restaints on my normal efforts at overt and direct political statements. (You can check out a book&nbsp;of poltical&nbsp;essays I put out called "No Sense of History" to see how far more direct I can be.)&nbsp; Here I am trying to be far more subitle and let others drive the discussing through them persenting their needs and fears.&nbsp; So as shown I meet professional females (lawyers, events directors) non-religous cab drivers, a TV newsman, vendors of all kinds, and of course hustlers of all kinds as well.&nbsp;&nbsp;I try to weave the stories together to show a country on the verge of coming apart based on both internal poltics and external forcess, but told only in the micro sense by people who are experencing the events and truly powerless to do much about them.&nbsp; I only add some macro evaluations as almost sidebars. <br /><br />The more recent events in Turkey is showing how valid these peoples' perceptions were; things that people in the West have little understanding and unfortunately little interest, unless the crises impacts them (or is shown&nbsp;on TV); or there are Ameicans involved in someway. So I am presenting the concerns and the wonderfulness of Turkey by this vehicale of two Americans wandering about ... and with the focus on the Americans and the Turkish issues brought in through encounters ... not through evaluations. <br /><br />In that work I use a line from Shakespare, from Henry V ... that roughly is&nbsp;about shipwrecked sailors clinging to a sandbar waiting for the next tide to come and wash them away ... This was the sense of quiet desperation I got from so many of the Turks with whom I spoke. So as with the line from Shakespeare .... the intention is to show the issues on the levels of individual fears mixed with fatalism and yet somehow hope and resistance, but also not truely in terror yet.&nbsp; While all of them are having their lifestyle threatened, and many of them facing a great deal of lost income, all were still asking "why" rather than panicing.&nbsp; With what has happened recently, I am sure many of them are far clsoer to panic then they were 15 months ago ... but few of them have any outlets ...&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />So I am trying to build symphathy without a hammer. <br /><br />4) the format is based on a down loaded template from a self-publishing company I used and will mostlikely use again .... Of coure I may change the size of the book to a larger one, since it is now longer than the simple story of Alyssa and I bumbling across Turkey together.&nbsp; But for now don't worry about the format<br /><br />Hope this all helps ... <br /><br />Glenn