Things you see out at sea

I work as a marine engineer on cargo ships out of Izmir, and what that means practically is that I spend two months at sea and then one month ashore, and during the two months at sea I am on a vessel with twelve people in the middle of water with very limited contact with anything else. You get ideas. That's the short version. The longer version is that confined spaces, long watches, and proximity to people you didn't choose make you observant in ways that are not always comfortable. I started writing short stories in 2019 during a long crossing to Rotterdam, in a notebook I bought in Piraeus, and I've continued since. The fiction is adventure but it is not romanticised maritime adventure. The sea in my stories is present as weather and navigation and the mechanical reality of keeping a vessel functional, not as symbol. The characters are working people: engineers, deck officers, port officials, the agent who meets the ship in Genoa at two in the morning and drives a ridiculous small car. I write in Turkish and occasionally in English when the story feels like it needs the distance. I've published in a Turkish literary magazine based in Izmir and I have enough stories for a collection. I haven't done anything with that yet.