Interviewed by the BBC

Not for my novel, alas, but it was incredibly fun.

For various reasons, I was contacted to see whether I wanted to be part of a group of American women who would take part in filming at the United States Consulate in Edinburgh. This turned out to be for a BBC2 programme called Unfinished, in which art journalist Alastair Sooke looked at a variety of unfinished masterpieces. This all ties in nicely to an adaptation of the unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I have to admit I have never read, though I have thought about rereading Bleak House soon.

The unfinished masterpiece in this case was Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, which is on the one dollar bill. It’s not obviously unfinished unless you look at the entire canvas.

I am a bit too starstruck here

It turned out that I was the only American woman available, though they did also find a guy to interview separately. The bulk of the segment was an interview with the current consul, who I am pleased to have known for her entire term in Scotland, and who was far more articulate than I was. Thankfully, the producer managed to find a segment in which I was being somewhat coherent. If you’re in the UK you can watch it (for a week – somewhere else said a month – I dunno) on the iPlayer – our segment starts around 24 minutes in.

I did not get to keep that dollar

I got the hang of it after a bit, as we kept refilming similar questions, either to get more material or to do the reaction shots. Alastair was quite nice – I have the feeling he has spent his life being referred to as That Nice Young Man – as were the production team. In general, I love watching other people do their jobs, so I very much enjoyed hanging out even when I wasn’t on camera. (I have now learned what a ‘dirty single’ is. It isn’t as much fun as you may be thinking.)

I don’t think a career as a broadcaster is anywhere in my future, but I hope to dabble in the media again soon.

Book report

I have a Google alert set up for The Girl in the Bunker and occasionally what pops into my inbox amuses me. Most recently, it was this question on Yahoo:

An overview of ‘The Girl in the Bunker’ Tracey S. Rosenberg? can someone tell me what happens in this book?

When I linked to this on my professional Facebook page and said, basically, ‘?’, a few people suggested it was some kind of book report due after the holidays. I don’t approve of using the internet to do your homework for you but I would love to read a book report on my own novel, partly because (I have to admit) I disliked writing book reports myself but am always glad to read other people’s opinions, even if I am shaking my head and wondering whether it’s actually my book they read.

Also, I’d be thrilled to little pieces if an entire class were assigned the novel!

Anyway, someone took it on themselves to post a ‘synopsis’:

Helga Goering is the eldest daughter of one of Hitler’s Fieldmarshalls and advisors.

Inspired by the 1936 Olympics, she knows that Hitler is obsessed with sport, so she endeavours to win his favour through Golf.

Even when war breaks out, she continues and starts to win championships, though the Berlin-Speigelei course remains the one course that defeats her as the sand trap on the 18th hole (Europeans call them bunkers) always gives her great difficulty.

This is Helga’s chance though. It is the great championship game and she and her Russian rival Anastacia Nikolaiovna will play in front of Hitler and Stalin

If she can win then she will have the Führer’s approval, but the game is even, the 18th hole is coming up and Helga shanks into the bunker.

Or you can read the summary on Amazon

In all my thoughts about the title of this book, a golf parody never even crossed my mind….

Lizards

I decided to self-publish my short story ‘Lizards’ on Kindle. (Other formats may well follow, but probably not quickly unless anyone bemoans the lack.) This was partly because I’d submitted it to various places over the years, but it never got published, and I figured that I might as well put it out there myself rather than let it wither away on the hard drive. (Ironically, the main character is particularly concerned about her poems and her boyfriend’s novel living in a drawer permanently – something that was entirely plausible in Communist-era Romania. This was a regime that registered your typewriter.) And as it’s historical fiction, it ties in nicely to The Girl in the Bunker, so seemed an appropriate follow-up.

I clearly have A Thing about young women in totalitarian situations.

So I did a final polish, and my husband did the conversion stuff (because he likes geeking out that way), and I found a very nice public domain photograph of a typewriter – it’s a German typewriter, if you look closely enough, but I’m quite fond of it – and I filled out all the bank detail stuff and selected the various royalties and prices, and uploaded it. Not long after, it appeared on Amazon.

Huh. So that’s why people self-publish.

It’s available worldwide, which in practice seems to mean the United States, the United Kingdom, and various European Amazon sites (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain). I also have a nice shiny author page, which mostly serves to link ‘Lizards’ with the novel. I could not, unfortunately, also tie in the Victorian novel I edited, Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael, because you can’t put an edited book on an author page (unless it’s an anthology, apparently), which seems ridiculous, but there you go.

As part of my (small) publicity campaign, I got in touch with the Fulbright Commission in Romania. This wasn’t completely random – ‘Lizards’ is set in Ceausescu-era Bucharest, as I mentioned, but more significantly, I wrote it when I was a Fulbright scholar there. They were quite pleased to spread the word, with the result that I now have the following publicity:

New Publications by US Fulbright Alumna Tracey S. Rosenberg

I also have a piece on the State Alumni site, but it’s only visible to members; still, it’s the same basic information as the Fulbright Commission piece.

The moral of this story: always let people know what you’ve done. They may well be pleased for you and give you a shoutout. And the final irony? This self-publication may actually lead to ‘Lizards’ coming out in print. But more on that if it happens.

Those paper literary sculptures

I’m thrilled to see that the mystery paper sculptures that turned up around Edinburgh over the past several months have become international news. It was a laugh-out-loud moment to see a friend in the states share the NPR story, and to see my photographer (that’s Chris Scott) namechecked for his work.

Please do everyone admire them.

Bigthink wonders whether print is the new counterculture. Thoughts?

And no, to answer a friend’s joking query in the same spirit he asked – while I am based in Edinburgh, and am very good at procrastinating, and love to come up with new and exciting ways to avoid writing, they are not my creations. (Angry Birds is more my speed.) I only wish I were that talented!

Researching the Nazis

I wasn’t able to attend the Novel Approaches conference at the Institute of Historical Research, but they kindly gave me the opportunity to write up some of my thoughts on historical research:

Researching the Nazis: The Girl in the Bunker

360 Narratives

This weekend I attended a two-day event, part of Creative Scotland’s Creative Futures programme: 360 Narratives. This brought together a few dozen creative people who work in narrative – novelists (for adults and kids), screenwriters, playwrights, game designers, graphic novelists – and mixed us all up to create cross-genre ideas in a variety of platforms. There were also useful talks, and some smaller sessions with various case studies, and two excellent lunch buffets. (A tiny little oven holding baked potatoes! I am so easily entertained.)

Here are some of the things I learned:

Always check train times in advance. This allowed me to realise that, er, the earliest Sunday train from Edinburgh arrives in Stirling one minute before the programme is due to begin. I told the conference organisers that I’d be slightly late, and as a result, they made sure I was on site before starting. I even had time to grab a cup of herbal tea.

Always apply for the hardship fund. Two cheap day returns were less than £20, and even with my rapidly deteriorating employment situation, that was not going to break the bank. However, I saw that there were funds available, so I wrote a brief e-mail politely explaining my situation and asking whether I could be considered for them. And lo, my train fares were reimbursed.

Put your photograph on your business cards. One of the best sessions was a speed dating event – all of the excitement, none of the soul-crushing rejection! – where you spent two minutes (each) talking to everyone else in the room. Even though the icebreaker involved bringing an object of significance (more on that later), it was still difficult to remember exactly who everyone was. I use Moo cards, and as my book cover annoyingly didn’t scale appropriately to be used as the opposite side, I put my professional photo. I lost count of the number of people who thought this was a fantastic idea, and I really appreciated the other folks who did similar things.

Be willing to sing. One of the exercises involved being randomly given a genre, a location, and a platform. My group of five received manga, hospital, folk song. We needed to pitch it. We ended up with a two-verse adaptation of ‘Hotel California’ which we did in fact sing. (Badly, but entertainingly.) The audience loved it and the judges awarded us first place. I was so far out of my comfort zone that I needed a passport to get back in – both in terms of the singing and the collaboration, which is not something I have done much of creatively – but it was huge fun, especially since I was with four other people also willing to make fools of themselves. (The prizes were varied. I got – appropriately enough, given the weekend’s title – a 360 pen. I shall use it to write with, and when I am bored, I shall spin it.)

People love cows. For my special object, I brought Moocow. She has traveled with me to Iceland, Spain, Japan, Washington DC, and Chile. Here she is on Easter Island, pretending to be a moai:

The official photographer loved her, and she turned out to be the star of the other pitch, which required us to use three special objects. It was a time travel story in which she is sent back in time after being – well, I won’t give away the plot, in case we end up developing it. But in general, bringing a stuffed cow is a good idea. (A real cow, maybe not so much.)

I am not sure I’ll be applying for the week-long residency, as I don’t have any particularly collaborative ideas at the moment – but I shall be interested in hearing about what everyone else comes up with!

Review

In addition to the Amazon reviews – which have been blessedly and overwhelmingly positive – I have had two reviews in print: The Big Issue gave the book four stars in August, and only today I bought the new edition of The Scottish Review of Books. (I say ‘bought’ because it came with the Saturday Herald. I must admit that I do not normally read the Herald.)

I’m thrilled to say that the review is positive. There are no star ratings, which is fine by me – I’ve spent enough Augusts reviewing Fringe events to hate the sight of ‘em – and words like ‘original’ and ‘excellent’ and ‘compelling’ are always wonderful to hear. And of course the SRB is highly respected, and thus I am grateful for my novel being mentioned positively to the readership. (If anyone has found this blog because of the review: hello! You can buy the book here.)

There is one thing I find odd. It has nothing to do with my review or even the SRB itself. It’s the ad on the back cover for four poetry collections published by Polygon, a publisher I like very much and with whom I would be very happy to work someday. Here are the collections:

- These Islands, We Sing: An Anthology of Scottish Islands Poetry
- Sorley MacLean: Collected Poems
- The Poems of Norman MacCaig
- A Choosing: Selected Poems of Liz Lochhead

The island anthology has cover art which depicts an island – one assumes a Scottish island, given the subject matter. The MacLean and MacCaig collections have black-and-white photographs of the poets themselves, both looking thoughtfully out at the reader – MacLean seems a bit astonished, while MacCaig is clearly going to take a deep drag on that lit cigarette in his hand.

And the Lochhead? A full-length drawing of a woman who is removing her clothes. She’s wearing black knickers and a bra, and she’s just pulling her dress (?) over her head, so her face is half-covered.

(None of Lochhead’s other books with Polygon have her photograph on the cover, either. Mostly it’s just words.)

Overall, the ad gives the impression of being a crash course in The Male Gaze, even before you get to the poetry itself.

Catch-up

Well, Easter Island was amazing. I walked and walked, I went into a cave which has two ‘windows’ overlooking the Pacific, I was befriended by quite a few stray dogs (none of whom looked neglected in any way), I saw (many of) the famous stone figures, and I got a wee tattoo of a sea turtle. It’s subtle yet I can show it off without having to readjust my clothing. Quite pleased.

Then back to Scotland for a couple of literary events. At the end of September we had the final installment of the Cargo Special Delivery Tour, where I appeared at the Edinburgh Central Library alongside Allan Wilson and Andrew Raymond Drennan (chaired by Cargo MD Mark Buckland who, I swear, has psychic abilities; I shall bring him the next time I go to the races). This was the first time I was body-miked, and thankfully the tech guy did a very efficient switch when the battery started to die while I was onstage.

Then in October I fulfilled a long-standing dream – okay, the festival is only four years old, so it wasn’t like a childhood dream, but still, I really wanted to be part of it – by appearing at the West Port Book Festival, on a panel with fellow historical novelists Sara Sheridan and Iphigenia Baal, chaired by Lee Randall.

Alas, neither Dundee nor Lennoxlove worked out, so I am currently not booked into anything, I have just realised. No! Not true! I’m going to Amsterdam next month for a book group appearance. My first foreign event!

Saturday, thanks to my New Writers Award, I and six other writers had a fantastic all-day workshop on presentation and performance. I consider myself to be a pretty good reader of my own work, but I found lots of ways to improve, so I am eager to try out my new skills.

And soon, hopefully before the end of the year, I shall be jumping on this Kindle bandwagon. You see, I have a short story titled ‘Lizards’ about a Jewish family in Ceausescu-era Romania, which I wrote when I was a Fulbright scholar. I’ve never placed it anywhere, so I’m going to publish it in electronic form. Thankfully, I have my publisher’s full support on this; I understand this is not always the case. I will, of course, let you know in this space when it’s available.

And I hope you are all well yourselves.

Happy birthday to me

Sorry for my long absence from this blog. I was hanging out with a few friends.

August (as was)

Oh my, that was about as much of a whirlwind as I’d expected. The addition of a cold just made the final week more…challenging. *coffcoffcoff*

My book was for sale in the shop at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as can be seen in this lovely photograph taken by the festival photographer. I won’t know the final sales figures for several weeks, but they definitely sold quite a few, as I signed several for friends and strangers alike.

I appeared twice at the festival – once as part of Cargo’s Unbound evening, and once as a solo during the free ten-minute readings sponsored by Bonhams. They were both amazing, but the second was particularly sweet as I was introduced by festival director Nick Barley, and lauded as a festival success story – after all, I spent the last two years working for the festival, and then I was an author, hanging out in the yurt (other festivals have green rooms…) and attending a variety of receptions. (Many thanks to the London Review of Books for being so generous with their attendance policy!)

I also helped run, and did events at, the Inky Fingers minifest, which was six days of mayhem. I have never before thought so carefully about microphones.

And I reviewed for ThreeWeeks, which meant boiling down many events into 120 words. I’m not quite done with reviewing, though, as I am lucky enough to be going to see Die Frau ohne Schatten in a few days.

Then next week I am away to South America….