Exiliado: Where I’m At

I wrote something on here back in November, The Armour of a Queer Canon (or La Que Puede, Puede), and for some strange reason it’s been getting a consistent 100 or so reads a week since. I’m thrilled, obviously, but I’m curious as to where it’s being shared that it’s reaching that much of an audience.

I used to have that much of an audience here too, back when Twitter worked properly and I was very focused on writing weekly. It’s been fun to write Chasing Nelson for the Gibraltar Chronicle every two weeks, but it means Exiliado has suffered, because I’m writing there what I used to write here. It also feels a bit like I’m screaming into the void when I wrote those Chronicle columns. I send off my work and it gets published. Most of the time I don’t even look at it. Then people read, I guess. People like it? Hate it? I have no idea.

A famous writer once told me that no matter how famous a writer gets, they always want to hear that someone liked their work. I guess it’s what we want deep down, if we’re putting work out there. Otherwise I might as well be writing privately, never to be shared. It’s not about money or status or legacy or the sanctity of art of whatever. For me, it’s about sharing stories in my head and eliciting a response from an audience of any size. That’s the best part. Even if you tell me you hate my work, at least you’re reading it.

I suppose it’s worth saying that last year was a strange year. I spent most of it working on a novel and waiting for a green card. When I wasn’t working, I was crossing the Atlantic at a rate of about every six weeks, because my husband was over in the States and I was in London. It was a weird, isolating time where I was many days hoping for the day to be over so I could cross it out.

And I had this feeling like I would arrive here in the States and I would suddenly just be happy, without considering that often the body and the mind and the soul take time to adjust to things, and moving continents, however much I deluded myself, isn’t just a case of hopping and skipping over. What I mean is, it’s taken a while to find my life here, and even then there are of course things I’d like to do. I’d like to make some friends and be more social. At some point I’ll be looking for a job.

I spent some weeks hibernating and it was very good for me. Now I’m getting up an exercising, and going out into DC and taking advantage of everything this incredible city has to offer. I am currently writing this from the Folger Shakespeare Library reading room, a space that is quieter and more modern and less completely packed than The London Library and yet is completely free. I feel like any day now they’re going to approach me and tell me they made a mistake and kick me out.

I’ve been thinking about what to write about on here, weekly. I think I want to be completely self-indulgent about writing and creativity and art and culture. I want to write about the joy of creation, which I am currently exploring. I want to discuss how everything in life seems to have been commodified into a product to sell or some kind of productivity that must be tracked until everything feels like work. And other things…things I’ve learned, and I am learning about writing and being a creative person in these times.

For now, here’s where I’m at:

• I’ve given up on social media for the most part because it’s so ridiculously depressing or ad-based. I am sad about this because Twitter had a nice community going before the algorithm broke. Threads is pretty useless. Bluesky is empty. I am on Instagram, which I like: @jspzro
• I’m still writing Chasing Nelson and you need a free account to read them, but they’re online. There isn’t really a directory for them, but they’re up every two Tuesdays and in print in the Gibraltar Chronicle, or you can just Google them.
• I’m doing an MA in Creative Writing with Northeastern University which has been nice for trying out new projects. I’ve hit my stride with writing. Although it’s pretty tiring in some aspects, and I’m realising that while I will always be learning and improving my craft, I’m doing pretty well on my own two feet. Apparently, it needed to take spending thousands of pounds to understand this, not the getting published or shortlisted for prizes, but there you go. I have a few projects on the go here though, including a trashy MM novel under a pseudonym, a novella about awful people, and a Gibraltar social history/Shakespeare non-fiction work that’s eating me alive.
• I have a first draft complete for my novel, and I keep intending to go in and work on the second draft, but things keep getting in the way. I just need to sit down and do it. The plan is to then polish up the first three chapters and start hunting down an agent.
• I had my first short story for this year published at The Crawfish Collective. It’s called ‘Jonesvile’ and you can read it here. Last year, I did not work on short stories and thus had no short stories published, and I realised I missed it a lot.
• Toying with the idea of a website but I am so unbothered by technology I will probably just end up paying someone to make one for me. However, I am going to give Squarespace a try soon.

Okay I think that’s good enough for now.

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