Journal Entry (This Thing Called Life)
Writing, Travel, Living Abroad
2-17-2026
Madrid, Spain
Tuesday
~
Well, Britney took off this morning at 5:15am, getting into an Uber and heading to the airport to fly to California for three weeks. I got up with her and carried her large, heavy, bulging suitcase down three floors and out to the waiting car. (She is bringing some of our stuff back to California for storage.) It was still dark. Waving to her as the car left, I felt a pang of emotion.
I miss her already, of course, but I also think it’s healthy for us to have a little break. Everything is good with us, but I just mean because we literally spend 24/7 with each other. All day, every day. And we still get into deep, long conversations. That’s pretty rare and magical.
I feel deeply satisfied in a literary sense right now. I finished a solid draft of a new novel I wrote a year ago titled, Nuances of Courage. I’d call it literary suspense. It’s got depth, emotion and power—and seeks to understand The Universal—but also has a whipcrack plot and fast pace. It’s a mix of highly autobiographical in some ways with totally created out of my rich imagination, things pulled out of thin air. In many ways the two main characters represent the two opposing and complicated versions of my inner self, and/or the Old Michael and the Current Michael, though it’s of course not that easy, simple and binary.
The first draft, which I pumped out in a quick four or five months in the fall of 2024 when Britney and I were living in Portland, Oregon, landed at 84,000 words. At the time I’d been reading Andrew Field’s 1967 biography of Nabokov and so, upon the more recent reread a while back, I chuckled when I saw thick graph upon thick graph detailing Nabokov’s life, being born and raised in Russia, fleeing after the 1917 Bolshevik-Lenin revolution, his ornate wealth, living as a literary expat in Berlin and later Paris, the United States, Switzerland, etc.
I did further reads of my novel after that and started revising seriously. In the end I realized the obvious: Kill your darlings is a real thing, people. I ended up cutting out about 97% of the Nabokov sections because, let’s face it, they had nothing to do with the actual character or the actual plot. They were what editors (of which I am one) call “Info Dump,” wherein a writer drops a whole lot of raw information which doesn’t necessarily have to do with the story being unfolded. Very common. Especially if you’re writing say historical fiction (mine is not).
Anyway, I trimmed the novel down from 84,000 to a thin, sexy 72,000, cutting out 12,000 words, probably 85% of it being the Nabokov material. But there were also some irrelevant scenes (one of which I truly loved but I realized had no rational place in the story), some general redundancy, some weakness with the characters, some sentences, syntax, verbs and diction which needed cleaning up, etc.
I also added things here and there, but the general overall trend was cutting. I enjoyed slicing and dicing and watching the word count slim down over time. I forgot that editing, revising and rewriting is work, yes, but it can also be quite fun. (Sick as that may sound to some fellow writers who hate the process.)
My debut novel, The Crew, arguably took me 16 years, from first draft in 2008 living in San Francisco at the still-drinking age of 25, to January of 2024, at 41, a sober adult finally ready to put his precious baby out there into the world. During those 16 years I wasn’t always working on the novel, of course—there were years which went by without my even looking at it—but I did, indeed, do an incredible amount of revision.
I must have gone through 50 or 60 drafts, easily. Maybe more. Every single word in that novel was examined and re-examined. Only by 2016 did literary agents start requesting it, and then one agent read the novel all the way through three times and wrote me glowing emails about it (I revised slightly each time), only to disappear on me forever.
I had also hired a former Random House editor who went over the novel with me and loved it; she gave me some helpful feedback which I took. Dozens of lit agents read the book…but in the end no one offered representation. The timing was bad: When it first started gaining lit agent attention Trump was on the rise. I was a WSM. (White Straight Male.) Not a great time. A couple agents said this more or less directly.
Anyway, I have this new novel and I’m proud of it and I think it’s really got some mojo. Every time a novelist finishes a book it’s exciting. The process of writing a novel is, for me, always fun on the first draft, and then emotionally and spiritually draining after that. First it’s this nascent, inchoate inner treasure, but then the thing is birthed, small and dirty and covered in plasma, and it quickly becomes A Living Thing, a thing which, like the U.S. Constitution, must be interpreted and argued about and amended over time. Editing and revision are, of course, crucial. Even Jack Kerouac understood that.
The myth of Kerouac was that he wrote his famous 1957 classic On the Road in a couple nights high on speed on a scroll of paper in his apartment. This is true…about the first draft. Had things gone his way, yes, that would have been the published version (the whole “spontaneous bob prosody” and “first word best word” approach), but in reality Viking Press, the original publisher of the classic novel, made him do years of endless cuts, edits and revisions. The final product was polished, not done in 48 hours of madness while high on speed. (But the myth is so much more fun!)
Stepping away from writing and literature.
We have been traveling a LOT. Which was, of course, the whole point of living in Spain. Madrid was to be the starting-point from which we would explore the world. And we have been. We just got back from 17 days in East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar: Read that essay HERE. It was incredible and very exhausting. We moved around by plane, boat and car. We hung out with East African Maasai tribes, did a four-day safari where we got so close to lions we could touch them (but didn’t, obviously), and stayed a week right on the beach in Zanzibar, the island off the coast of Tanzania.
It was hot and humid and water had to be pumped everywhere we went. Poverty was high and kids were constantly begging us for food, water and money in exchange for handmade bracelets and other things. It was both tragic and profound. It made it easy to locate gratitude for being American, being “from the West.”
Before Africa we were in Finland and Denmark. Read that essay HERE. Last summer we visited Paris, Poland, Budapest, Italy, Sardinia, Slovakia, Ireland and more. A couple years ago we traveled to Morocco and Thailand. Britney and I are meeting March 8th in Lisbon, Portugal and doing a road trip around that country and through other parts of Spain. We were originally going to leave Spain in April—at our one year mark—but have decided to use our final three months in the Schengen Zone here, and so we won’t be leaving Spain until the last few days of June.
From there we’re moving 1,400 miles east to Albania, bordered by Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, etc. It’s an hour-and-a-half flight to Istanbul, Turkey. The reason for Albania is that it’s cheap, safe, up-and-coming (expected to join the EU in 3-5 years) and Americans can live there visa-free for one year. If we like it we may try to get a visa and stay longer. Or we’ll move somewhere else outside of the Schengen Zone. (Georgia, the country, Panama, Costa Rica, etc.) We’ve also considered moving back to the States briefly (after Albania) and working on getting a visa to live in Mexico City, where we’d be closer to family in California and have access to South American travel.
The world is wide open, man. I am 43, B is 40, and we have three cats. Her son is 20 and still lives in Lompoc, California. (He has visited several times.) Since B is also a quarter Okinawan (her maternal grandmother was born and raised in Okinawa and married a soldier in the 1950s, B’s maternal grandfather) we have thought also about moving to Japan. We wouldn’t qualify for any special treatment because of her heritage for several reasons, unfortunately, but B has been to Japan several times and loves it and I’ve never been there but would totally be up for it. I have heard nothing but good things about Japan.
Meanwhile we have lived for just under a year in Madrid, Spain. It was a dream of ours for so long, and we took all the steps—many of them exceedingly challenging—and actually did it. I can’t explain how satisfying that is: Having a goal, a dream, and following through, taking all the steps, and actually doing it.
Let’s face it: Most people have big dreams which they never truly pursue. That was me myself in some ways for a while. B had lived in the same small town all her life. I’m not sure either one of us would have done it on our own. Maybe. But together we were unstoppable. It was a long, slow visa process, filled with hiccups, ups and downs, unexpected twists and turns (such as my ancient criminal history which came back to bite me) and lone dirt roads which led to weird places. But we made it. We did it. Here we are.
All in all it’s been an interesting year. Being American expats is fun. We get to see America, that glorious and complex behemoth, from 6,000 miles away. With sociological and psychological distance. Every nation has its problems. Spain is no different. Trump definitely looks clownish and half-insane from my vantage point. It all comes off as madness, really. And yet: I also see the hyperbole of America’s fractured, polarized politics, and the way the media on both sides clearly use clickbait and rage-bait to gain attention, subscribers, and to keep eyeballs on the news and to maintain infighting which grows profits for the media but harms civil society as a whole.
It’s not terribly surprising that I am living this lifestyle. In most ways I’ve always been a free agent, a free thinker, an outsider, someone who is much more interested in pure, raw life experience versus the middleclass life, the boring 9-5 drudgery which most Americans partake in. In high school it was punk rock. In my early twenties it was hitchhiking across America. In my thirties it was exploring the new country of sobriety and AA. And more recently it’s living abroad and traveling the globe.
Most people see having children as The Highest Achievement. From a biological and evolutionary perspective this is really the only “purpose” of life. To reproduce, to carry on the species, to hand down DNA from one generation to another as we’ve been doing for millions of years. (Hundreds of thousands of years for we humans in our more or less current form as bipedal big-brained hominids.) B has a 20-year-old son, as I said. But I’ve never wanted kids. I know the trend in America is less kid-friendly, but I don’t see myself as being part of that trend. I’ve always wanted independence. I’ve never viewed parenthood as something I “needed” to do to feel whole. I don’t judge anyone who does feel that way: Like I said, you’re the norm and I am the odd one out here.
Maybe it’s selfishness, sure. I can’t deny there’s some of that. But I also know in my heart of hearts that I have the capacity to be a good dad, and that having a child would, like it does for everyone, change me profoundly. Yet I also know the right thing for me is not to have kids. (One was enough for B.) Life is short. Even for us, sans children, the days, weeks and months go by fast, faster every year. Tomorrow we’ll wake up and be 65. (I still feel like I’m 25 sometimes.) Writing has always been my burning inner fire, my concentrated passion. It still is. As is travel, love, backpacking, solitude, reading books, being in the wilderness, etc.
Britney and I are living our lives our way and on our terms. Why shouldn’t we? There are no “rules” to this thing called life. Only choices.
We have made ours with purpose.
New novel? ETA yet?