of geoffrey tatton welcome thank you bob i'm so glad to be here pleasure a word about our author is a former academic widely recognized for innovations in digital mapping jeffrey repaired the industry as a developer analyst and consultant eventually settling down as a technical communicator telling computer uses what they should and shouldn't do over the last six years he's posted over six hundred articles essays stories and memoirs a progressive pilgrim review counterpunch medium in the at this arts anthology as told by things a short story narrated by a grumpy malware infested peacey having said all that is no special qualifications as a novelist beyond sweating through nine editorial revisions of this his st book i like to read just a small busy section of a forward to the book turkey shoot jeffries latest endeavor to give you a short introduction to it this book tells a story of one such jihadi a twenty something sunni muslim devout but no fundamentalist fanatic what radicalized him was not the secular stench of western civilization even though he had strong doses of it as a youngster and iraq his own path to salvation is personal as jihad is supposed to be and motivated by revenge as not what put him on it was the unnecessary and that invasion of his country by the us they turned his family into internal refugees ultimately leading to the slaughter of his parents at the hands of an isis militia mahmoud is on the warpath not because some in brainwash them because his life was ruined secured his own faith he despises those who twist islam to justify despotic atrocities and is willing to find a common ca with anyone with the courage to stop them jeff wanted to give us a synopsis of your book in its entirety if you can sure i don't think i can tell you the whole story but i want to show how it starts we have mahmoud being ejected from iraq or more actually fleeing from iraq with the help of some kurds and he gets into northern syria where it's sort of a safe area and the kurds turn him over to a militia first picture place  which is fighting isis people like this so he joins the battle he wins with the militia and with the kurdish forces they beat back isis in a battle for taleban and then there's problem with the kurds and they get and he and his international brigade back up and evacuated across the turkish border at which point because he was so brave in his fighting for for his brigade and for the against isis he's now chosen by his company commander for a mission  that's it's just like about five miles off the turkish coast in chiapas he bribes a turkish fisherman who's looking for way to see the profit from these refugees to take him rigorous where he's supposed to be and he context by phone the person who he's supposed to be volunteering for who seasoned terrorist well he meets his new comrades and they go and they have a plan to go to this place which is an ampitheater in turkey to do some dastardly thing and but that doesn't work out i won't tell you the reasons soon but they regroup and they decide to do another mission entirely and what that is involve this place which is also in turkey and i won't go into that but he is with five other people who are two turks a swiss and austria n and well he's fit and so these people have problems getting along for a while but they eventually bond they have to flee from where they are because of something that the police do and then they have to set themselves up and figure out what the hell are going to be doing or should they just give up they want they want to make a difference they want to pull off a radical act but they don't really know what it can be now that the original mission has been scotched and we'll see what they how they interact you get it you get a real close  look at their profiles their fears their doubts you know their quirks and especially mahmoud you know who who who is basically a fish out of water and he is learning to cope with all these foreigners in a foreign land you know with nothing you know sort of to back him up except and so as as we go through the rest of the book he ends up being a sort of he ends up with a woman who's been essential to stalking him and and this causes a lot of problems for the group because nobody quite trust her but in the end you will see that a resolution is forthcoming and that she becomes a trusted or possibly trusted co i'll leave it at that that's just the st half of the book a lot more happens right i read the whole book it's it's very detailed tell me in your career academically whatever you've written a lot of things i assume virtually all of those are nonfiction things it would i would say it's sort of half and half a really y lot i've done a lot of short stories a lot and a lot of memoirs i don't know if you call it nonfiction i guess it is but yeah i mean i started out doing academic writing i have like fifty academic titles to high what so my real question is what made you decide what genre to use as a book fiction versus nonfiction i mean what was the key decision because a lot of the events in the books in the book resemble or are almost identical to things you read in a newspaper or see on c n n or other places right well it's the news that actually motivated me to write the book and i decided as soon as i want as soon as i knew what it was about even though i didn't have the plot that i would following real events and so for out the writing of it when something happened in that part of the world that was relevant to the book i would find a way to sneak it in and sometimes you know the sequence gets a little bit off because you know this book takes place within a period of a couple months and what we're talking about actually took longer than that but what motivated me was the fact that in the summer of tw all these refugees were streaming from syria and afghanistan and northern africa into greece and into italy mainly and they had nowhere to go and while germany welcome some of them as they move north they were not very well taken care of and our politicians this is even before trump was involved with saying oh you can't let these people in there might be terrorist among them you know we can we can we have to we have to guard our borders blah blah blah and i thought this was both over overblown and prejudicial of muslims and so i said i will give you feel is out to destroy our way of life in hades democracy and i will make you weep for him and that's when i came up with the character of mahmoud and i and obviously it had to be fictionalized because i don't know anybody like that right but you but there was a purposeful and ten most romantic intend to make mahmoud and attractive radicalized if we could call it that is that not true in other words as you say in one of the subtitles of the book this is a a radical who will surprise you is like anti hero right romantically if they're all anti heroes and what's odd about this book is that there are no good guys there are i mean there are people who work for the government of thickly the greek government you know who who who are a threat to these guys but it is entirely still narrated in from their point of view and i don't know of any work like spy fiction that deals with with political radicals which quite does that correct and i've also been told by your daughter that as a family or individual whatever you've gone to turkey and been there more than once and you're somewhat familiar with that part of the world as compared to most americans who haven't done that you know i have a good familiarity with turkey and its culture and its politics having been there i don't know half a dozen or more  times i haven't been to the places that the pope travels to but but that's ok there are other ways to get to know them absolutely and you can be talking to turkish people who can tell you about the rights of those very very people so that clearly that relationship meaning your marriage play a relationship with with this book was to some degree because of your familiarity with it and the crisis that is going on that is going on today as we speak yeah exactly and things have just gotten worse in greece in greece like europe and turkey and and presumably in in syria i'm not sure if iraq is worse off than it was in two thousand and fifteen but you know there was so much damage that still hasn't been repaired and may never be repaired is the problem the so many militias and so much dysfunction and non governmental right exists is what slow back looks like i mean exactly he's no one should be surprised the people there are people like this my characters you know who are out to strike against what they call the empire there was an excellent book called blowback which was exactly written after her foolish invasion of iraq and it's a actually done book it's but it's a non fiction basis and tells of the absurdity of of the bush foreign policy would say in the middle east and stocking the war that he won the stat for whatever reasons get rid of saddam hussein but look what we have i mean he was terrible and what's there now is terrible it's not an easy area of the world and whose business is it to go in there and dump and well better yet you know international law what what is a strong country russia in the crimea states intervening in iraq whatever there's no restraints the moral restraints only works so well  and then we're left with devastation years after years of of humanitarian crises and military costs and dead wood and we leave russia leaves although they haven't left the crimea and they may not and will left for the wake which is never a good situation politically socially economically and as we t syrian government fighters are about to attack the last rebel stronghold in syria and everyone is worried about a chemical attack and it's in the news every day so it's an un crisis is sort of like reading your book because it's very detailed it was like it was just bringing out exactly what was happening in the world on and on and on it's like you want to stop it even though the book is interesting it's like i've heard about this so much there's no resolve you know there's no resolve and if you care if you're educated and understand international politics it's  of the world get very wearisome and with our president they get extremely worrisome even in those type of issues he's exacerbated the turkish situation so many ways different than what we're talking about in turkey but it's just know trump is complicating everything and you know i mean if he has prevented turkey tore into russia's arms i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing but if he destroys their currency if he keeps pushing economically with that in mind to get them to behave his way we could have another blowback of the numerous consequences in turkey and maybe a refugee crisis yeah oh absolutely there would be one so it's because there are still hunt one hundred or two hundred thousand syrian and other refugees camped out in turkey and you know what are they going to do or you know w putin say ok we cleaned up the bad guys you can come home now i mean sorry your cities are rubble but you know they're they're never going to come home most of those people because home isn't home to them anymore and you know even syrians in jordan they should overthrow the government and the results cause a crisis in that section of the middle east in jordan which you know could very well happen but enough is enough we whether or the consumer who isn't that aware of politics in the area doesn't really read the newspapers very much will they buy something like that as opposed to they should in my mind if they like that john or of writing but you know maybe we weary in even reading another book you know i don't i don't know if they will or not but i'm hoping that the cover where else can you tell me or want to tell us about about the book that we haven't talked about well you know these this group of radicals doesn't have has a scary few resources but fortunately they have a patron who who is housing them but they don't but they can't tell him what they are what they're up to so they have to be very secretive and they have to figure out how to how to  with almost no money and how to get to where they're going in it in a way that one attract attention and as a result of that they end up complicating their mission and they also and  hmoud becomes the the hitman as it were whereas the others are playing supporting roles but as he says near the end of the book he didn't do this alone it he learned that there it takes teamwork and dedication to to fight against all odds you know to get something done and even though everyone is going to look at him as a man they have you know it's a group effort absolutely but you know in reading reading about the individual members of the group you get the feeling least i got the feeling you know some of them say oh that's really so and so you know on this one we can't tell you that but you get the feeling some of them have maybe three or four identities that are a backdrop that we don't even know about because of the chaos of the area you also have that sort of women whatever i kept thinking is it going to be something at the end that's going to tell me then this is the energy of so and so are is that just remain in is that left by the author deliberately to keep you wondering in i mean it has that flavor to it which is it's kind of nice because you don't want to reveal everything well and you know it as they say in the blur you know what they do changes their lives and change and may change the course of history because and they end up being different kinds of people's slightly and they started out being strong you know a blurb about the book it's actually a couple pages tube of three thousand five hundred so called media influencers around the country media influences yeah i don't know who they are because i did this through the ip they may have three or four independents who publish or is association which i joined and they have a lot of benefits to help authors publicize books and publishers and i became my publisher with the imprint call perf press but actually the publisher is something called gatekeeper press and they are handling all the all the set up the type aren't worth the cover design but i'm working with them every step of the way of  then they put it into distribution and so when it hits the street it will be a paperback and an e book that will be in i books and amazon and kobo and barnes and noble and a bunch of distributors it's sort of libraries and universities they're very good at that so i don't have to get my you know figure out how to contact distributors it's all it's it's all part of the deal it's good it takes a lot of worry and i have a press release that i'm going to send to media local media and libraries and places like that i have a flyer i have book cards that i can place in bookstores and libraries so you know starting small i'm hoping to get you know a bit of a fan base in the boston area right and having i published a book myself it is getting somehow getting a review by unknown person or company really significant if it were to happen and it was positive oh sure  unfortunate but maybe a nd edition will have those things i don't know so that's why my media blast should result in a b five or ten people inquiring and i will send them the book and or more information and hopefully they will do something with the right response to it or say hey i like that a lot let me write in the omaha times whatever whoever these people  that the book is really interesting and so what it what is the already looking forward to project two in the book world in the book world who did you enjoy the whole process of writing i was glued to it i didn't enjoy it all but you know i kept needing to to improve it you know i went through nine revisions over the course of almost two years  and thanks to my beta readers who you know gave me a lot of good feedback or bad feed tech in some cases well but but that simple i had a volunteer editor in the early days that was that was wonderful and then ever since the end of july i mean i've just focused on the marketing which is entirely new to me right and it's a tough nut but you know i've listened to a lot of plod casts about how you  novel notice and and how you deal with certain media types how you know how you get the your best hit on amazon because seventy percent of all books sold online or sold on have to be edited down i don't know and you know it could be very valuable p r very well i hope you can use us and i wan say thank you for coming it's a pleasure to have you on the show and the last time i did this we were doing two professors on the emmy and genocide so we do all kinds of different subjects yeah this is a very interesting one but we have to wrap up and thank you poorly opportunity him i hope i made myself crystal clear certainly clear crystal we don't know