Periodically I go back to trying to write a book with several main characters and inter-connecting plots. This is something I first attempted in the early 1970s when I was writing politically-themed novels. The first was a book called Utopia Parkway-Exit 1/4 Mile which is a highway sign on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, NY. That version had four main characters and about the same number of supporting characters and three plot lines. I was never satisfied with it and later, using the same title, wrote a second book about a group of graduate students at a Midwestern college that used composite characters from my own MFA experience. This book also had four main characters and a host of supporting players and though my agent at the time tried selling it, he couldn't place it with a publisher. Jimmy Powell, who at the time was running the Writers' Center of Indiana, did publish an excerpt of it in a literary magazine called In-Print. The idea, though, did not die there. I attempted it again with 6 main characters in probably my most autobiographical novel about the last year of my bookstore Intellectuals & Liars in LA. That was called Lost Illusions but again my agent could not find a home for it anywhere. I tried again with Wooing Wu, a romance between a Chinese PhD candidate and a burnt-out American poet/teacher set in the early 1990s in NYC, but though that book has a cast of eight characters, the focus is really on the two main characters and the other six characters are purely supporting characters in the romantic comedy and only really appear in the sections devoted to the main character they interact with. It wasn’t until I wrote Night & Day that I achieved the desired effect of several stories involving about 10 main characters crisscrossing through each other’s lives. It was like trying to keep 10 balls in the air at once and was exhilarating. The plot revolves around the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a college on Long Island and the romances that develop or don’t quite develop between various members of the college community. Since A Midsummer Night’s Dream has four distinct groups—the court, the lovers, the fairies, the clowns—it was best suited to a romance that involved multiple ethnic and racial groups. My agent at that time spent two years submitting it to various publishers but again had no success finding a home for it. It was a major disappointment not only for me but for her, too. I found, though, that the idea just wouldn’t go away and sometime after returning to Turkey in 2010, I wrote another book using the same motif—a theatre group at a college putting on a new version of a Shakespearean play—set in Istanbul. That book, Istanbul Days, Istanbul Nights—uses Romeo & Juliet instead since rather than feuding families, I let the idea of language and culture be the stumbling block to the potential romances between foreigners working in Istanbul alongside Turks. The theatre director also decides to refashion the tragedy as a comedy and this book is lighter in tone than Night & Day, though both are bittersweet. So the two books are similar in some ways but different in others. There are characters who fulfill the same roles in both books but their back stories are different and in most cases their lives take different turns. That was the fun of writing those books: letting these characters loose to bump and collide on their own. And though there are characters who are left alone at the end of Istanbul Days, there aren’t any tragic events that befall characters in Night & Day. Perhaps life for foreigners is harder in America than in Turkey, or perhaps I saw more heartbreak there than here. I’m not sure why that is, but then again winning half the time is pretty good odds in life. After all, Mickey Mantle only had a career batting average of .298, Willie Mays .302, and Ty Cobb has the record high of .366. So getting it right half the time is like having a .500 batting average which in baseball is deemed impossible. And love is pretty much impossible half the time and a miracle the other half. And ain’t that a kick in the proverbial head?