Sweden.se

Flirting with the internet establishment with an article on Sweden.se. This is the website for the Swedish Institute and aims to give a ‘positive and progressive’ view of Sweden. My article on Christmas trees did just that… it was slightly sanitised with a good line about penis size perception affecting how big a tree is chosen, being cut…. and the text being americanised, so that lines like “he loves rubbish” became “he loves trash” not quite the same nuance, but still….. My favourite thing about the article is the comments at the end.These include:i´ve been there this last august and everybody where very nice to me. even when i got lost travelling in train. (from Silvana, Argentina)remembering Karin, a swedish girl a knew long time ago and is still in my best memories ( from Orlando, USA)   Merry Xmas and all that!

Back in Action….

It’s been a hell of a couple of months….. We bought a house, renovated parts of it, were let down by the bathroom company, the Swedish winter has set in… PLUS to top it all off….. my dad had a heart attack!Thankfully, having supped from the cup of eternal youth, he survived it and is almost back to his usual levels of boundless energy.So now that we’re through the worst of it… back to getting in print!I’ve made a couple of good contacts, with an article coming soon for The Swedish Institute’s website, Sweden.se, and a couple of commissions for the spring edition of South of Sweden Magazine. They quoted my Blatteland articlefor their winter edition as a footnote for an interview with Ivan Daza….. so maybe there’ll be a couple more Turnip readers in the South.        

One for the ladies…..

The Local again – This time it’s the women’s world cup

Click here for the article!

Full Flavour Turnip

Another day, another Turnip

The latest Turnip is complete after several days of messing about with html code and jokes about Swedish farmers.

Contents includes:

MOVING HOUSE…….. FINDING CULTURE……. NO MAN IS AN ISLAND…….. LOOKING FOR LOVE……. AND MELLANOPOLY….. and lots more!

Read it here

Tell your friends, tell your enemies just don’t tell the Swedish farmers

A great big bear

Another article on The Local, this time about Sweden’s wild animals. The title was originally ‘A Walk on the Wild Side’, but the editors were using this as their title for an article on Stockholm Pride. They changed the title to ‘If you go down to the woods today’, although I think they still had pride on the mind, as for several days the article was headed ‘If you go down in the woods today’. Here’s the article.

My two year old, Jesper, and I had fun researching the article at Kolmården Animal Park and spent the afternoon with their chief zoologist, Mats Höggren. Between being driven round in their gaudy tiger jeeps and hand feeding the lions (which traumatised Jesper), we chatted about the book. Another positive response and Mats told me about a filmmaker Swede in England who has a similar project. He also gave me a great book on Elks…. all good research as it’s interesting to see what’s out there already.

The summer holiday is winding up and other work is starting to come in again. Was approached by a Swedish magazine to write for them, so potentially more contacts and exposure.

A Local article, for Local people

I decided to pitch an article to The Local, the other day.

The motives were twofold: Firstly, as Sweden is asleep until the beginning of August, I needed the money! Secondly, as The Local is by far and away the most read English language website around. It is worth garnering a relationship, both in order to get some future (albeit modest) payment and also for as and when we publish, we need publicity. It’s always much easier to approach an editor that you know, and indeed have worked for.

I was slightly nervous about contacting them as, due to their popularity and tabloid style, they are the site that people love to hate. I was expecting to encounter a cantankerous old hack, but in fact ended up having a really nice friendly chat to the editor, James Savage.

So the article was published (read it here) and I feel good about contacting them again with some more article ideas and press releases in the future.

It’s summertime…

Sweden sleeps in the summer. Officially, the summer holiday begins in July, but mentally Swedes have been on holiday from the beginning of June. There’s simply too much to think about through June as the days begin to get warmer. Not only are there a huge number of ‘red’ days (bank holidays) but the evenings are finally warm and dry enough to go outside and meet people.

From our point of view, this is the calm before the storm… ….

The plan is to produce a ‘mock up’ or prototype of the book at the start of August, when people start going back to work and thinking a little beyond the next grillfest (barbecue). So for now I’m taking it easy, trying to tie up loose ends and working on the content of the mock up. I’m here at my office at the Mjärdevi Science Park in Linköping, trying to put in a few hours a day thinking about the book and things like this blog.

In the meantime, Kavel’s “Nothing much happens here….” illustration sums it up nicely.

A little background…..

In the summer of 2006, I moved to Sweden; Linköping, to be precise….

Over the last year I’ve been busy: setting up my own company, enjoying my expanding family, learning Swedish and settling in to a new life…… but that’s not what this blog’s about.

Last summer, inspiration struck as I was washing my hair (I have my most inspired moments in the shower). Inspiration struck in the shape of a root vegetable. A turnip to be precise.

At the time, everyone had a blog. You could (and probably still can) Google ‘Foreigner in Sweden’ (or variations on that theme) and be met by hundreds of blogs. My thinking was that people wanted to read something a little more in depth than just a blog about Sweden – there’s only so many times you can read about herring and IKEA.

So I started a webzine aimed at non-Swedes. The title to the ‘zine supposes that non Swedes look like Swedes, sound similar to Swedes, and at first glance are hard to tell apart from Swedes. What looks and tastes like a swede but isn’t? A Turnip!*

And so ‘The Turnip – A magazine for non Swedes’ was born.

Through setting up The Turnip, I met Kavel, who has been contributing some fantastic illustrations since Issue One. Kavel is a ‘proper Shoreditch artist’ and has been in Sweden about six months longer than me; in Stockholm, to be precise.

The Turnip has been coming out every three months or so and has got a growing readership and a number of different contributors.

And then (in the shower again) inspiration struck a second time. Why not put together a book about Sweden with Kavel?

Why not indeed!?

And that, dear reader, is what this blog is about…. how two people from London take on the Swedish publishing industry and get our book on the bookshelves. Then once the book is on the bookshelves, to get it off again and into your excited hands to be read by your excited eyes……

But I’m getting ahead of myself…….

*It was only later that I realised this hilarious joke doesn’t work on Americans as they call swedes ‘rutabugas’