Twenty Years in Spain – a writer’s life abroad

My first full year living in Spain, I wrote a novel.

It was a coming-of-age type novel, about growing up in the desert surrounded by addiction, abuse, and mental illness – in other words, autobiographical.

I’d write on sheets of printer paper between my classes at the language school. With a pen. I couldn’t afford a laptop. Almost nobody could in those days.

After I’d filled a number of sheets with scribbling, and it started to look like I had an actual novel on my hands, I bought some 4 by 6 index cards (or, more likely, their metric system equivalent) so I could map out a plot.

Spending 3 euros on index cards was quite an investment in those days: I couldn’t eat them, they weren’t keeping me warm during the harsh European winters, and they weren’t directly leading to me getting laid. But I saw those 3 euros as an investment in my future.

Don’t get me wrong: I had no illusions about publishing a successful coming-of-age novel.

This was all about the inner journey. I would write the novel, and in the process, become the kind of person who was capable of achieving goals.

I still remember laying out the index cards on the floor in my friend’s messy flat, and contemplating all the work I would have to do if I wanted to finish writing my first book.

It was intimidating, doing all that for no tangible payoff. But in the winter of 2006, I sat down and did it.

The life of an unpublished writer

That January in Madrid, I convinced my boss at the language school to write a letter about some “research” I needed to do, which I took to the National Library. They made me a reader card, and I wrote a good number of pages there, while looking through books about psychology and philosophy.

After several months, I had a first draft. I’d also moved into a flat with someone who owned a computer. I spent the summer typing my first draft into the word processor, editing as I went along.

It ended up being about 100,000 words – respectable “novel length”. And I didn’t think it was terrible. Of course, it might have been terrible in ways I was unaware of.

Actually it probably was. In hindsight, I can almost guarantee that it was terrible.

But I finished it, printed a copy out at a print shop, emailed myself the text file, and mostly forgot about it.

Like I said, this wasn’t about becoming a novelist. It was about becoming a person who achieves his goals.

I still had no long-term vision, but I figured the ability to set goals and achieve them would bend the arc of my life towards something positive. Eventually.

Kaizen, always Kaizen

After that summer of frantic typing, I struggled to write anything else. I was pretty burnt out. So I spent a lot of time cooking. I realized later that I was just expressing my creativity through making lasagna – apparently, I had to create something, and it didn’t much matter what.

Eventually, I wrote a few articles for “online magazines” that no longer exist. I tried my hand at short stories in Spanish. I composed wordy emails to friends back home.

In the meantime, I had other goals. I’d just overstayed my Spanish tourist visa, so “getting legal” was one of them. But that was large, ambiguous, and didn’t depend on me. So I was also just trying to apply the Kaizen method to my life. Small improvements, 1% at a time, which might add up to something else.

James Clear (of Atomic Habits fame) was still in college at that point, so the 1% thing wasn’t yet popular. I actually got the idea of “Constant Never-Ending Improvement” from some pirated Tony Robbins audios I’d gotten online. Sorry, Tony.

Later, I pirated a PDF copy of The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, and thought ol’ Timmy was pretty enthusiastic in a Silicon-Valley type way that had nothing to do with my life. My life, at that time, as an illegal immigrant in the second-worst neighborhood in Madrid.

(It’s hard for me to remember exactly how I got through those days, but apparently I was too broke to just buy a book and pay for shipping. Sorry, Tim.)

Something in the book must have inspired me, though, because soon after reading The 4-Hour Work Week, I started this blog.

It was on Tumblr, and nobody was writing anything lengthy on there. I spent a year or so just sharing quotes and pictures. After a while I started writing articles about life in Spain, or life back in Arizona, which were several paragraphs long.

Blog or die trying

Around the same time, with an eye towards actually making some money, I started a second blog in Spanish, where I started explaining English grammar and vocabulary to people who wanted to learn the language.

By this time, we were deep in the Great Recession, and writing was good for a couple of reasons:

1. It was a way to spend time that didn’t cost any money.
2. I was probably going to be deported, and wanted to have a backup plan for when it happened.

I figured if I could get enough traffic on my educational blog, I’d be able to make ad money until I got back on my feet in Costa Rica or something. This is what the kids today are calling a “strong extrinsic motivation”.

The new goal, then, was “become a successful blogger, or die trying”.

I worked my ass off. At the same time, I was going all over Madrid giving English classes for my day job.

The recession hit Spain hard, but at least I was employed. My teacher’s salary wasn’t great, but I could work all day and half the night if I wanted – even Saturdays and Sundays. The demand was intense. At the end of the month, I’d have a stack of twenties and fifties, which I’d take to the bank for my rent payment.

The rest was for protein and cheap wine. Somehow I was getting by, albeit illegally.

In the end, the Spanish government sent me a letter telling me to leave, but they didn’t actually deport me. I stayed, eventually got my visa situation worked out, and became a legitimate tax-paying resident. But I also kept writing.

Mo’ money, mo’ problems

You may already know that novelists are not well-paid. It’s the kind of thing that writers love to write about: the struggle of getting an agent, and getting published, and trying to make a living.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that unless you happen to sell millions of copies, being an author isn’t so much a career as it is a really shitty lifestyle choice. And most books sell hundreds – not millions – of copies.

I didn’t want to play the “find an agent and a publisher” game at all. Going through all that rejection for a few royalty checks – or maybe a small advance – didn’t seem worth it.

But when I saw that someone from an online forum (apparently just some guy like me) had published a book on Amazon, I looked into it. Turns out, anyone could self-publish on Kindle. And rumor had it that Amazon would soon be opening in Spain.

Well, that was interesting. What could I do? I picked a boring grammar topic, and sat at my kitchen table all summer (while my roommates where back in the pueblo) writing an ebook to sell on Amazon.

I couldn’t afford to put on the air conditioner, or go on vacation, so eating fried eggs and writing about phrasal verbs was most of my summer plan. I published on Kindle Direct Publishing and then kept on writing articles.

Writing an educational ebook was boring and repetitive, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as writing a novel.

By that winter, I’d sold several dozen copies and made an income literally in the low three figures as an author. As far as I could tell, that put me close to the top of the writing game.

Victory in Europe

Making a career out of writing is a bit like becoming a professional athlete: it’s bound to happen to someone, but that someone is probably not you.

Getting paid three figures for something you’ve written is already an accomplishment. I figured if I did more of what I was doing, I could make it to four figures – and four figures was halfway to eight… right?

A new goal started forming in my brain: maybe I could be a writer full time.

Over the next few years, I wrote a lot more grammar books, and made some online courses. I created paperback versions of any book that sold more than a few copies.

Some books did much better than others, but it was always a bit hit-or-miss. Eventually, though, I was making enough from my side hustle as an author that I could afford to quit my day job.

You know the scene in movies where someone’s alarm goes off and they slap at the snooze button, but eventually they have to get up anyway, because they’ve got some stupid job to go to?

Well, I still haven’t made it to eight figures, but I also have no idea what that’s like.

It’s been years since I got out of bed because of financial necessity.

Even my last few years as a teacher I jumped up in the mornings ready to attack the rat race with all I had. My financial independence plan was working, and victory was inevitable. I just wasn’t quite there yet.

On June 30th, 2015, I cashed my last paycheck and walked away from the Spanish labor market – hopefully forever.

Memories of a Redneck

The first articles of any substance I wrote here on this blog were called things like “Memories of a Redneck” and “Teaching for Dropouts”.

The first was about happy childhood memories of shooting rats in the junkyard owned by my best friend’s grandparents. The second about the irony of having failed to get a formal education myself, and now finding myself in the position of educating others.

I think I was discovering that my background was a bit unusual for the type of situations I was finding myself in, here in Europe. Maybe that’s a normal part of becoming an adult, but I didn’t realize that at the time.

When I was a kid back in the Arizona desert, almost everybody else had grown up in the Arizona desert, just like me. (In theory, the adults also had backstories of some kind, but I wasn’t interested in them.)

Eventually, at my school, we got some kids who – in a shocking twist – had grown up in the suburbs of New York or Chicago, before their dads had been sent to Phoenix for work. (Those kids had actually tried drugs, and generally led much more interesting lives than I had.)

By the time I had dropped out of university, moved to Spain and written a novel, I was feeling like I was on a unique life path, and making up everything about adult life as I went along. Surely nobody else from the Arizona desert was living a life like mine.

As I got older, my story continued getting weirder, but I now realize that’s probably normal. We’re all on a journey of some kind, and life has its bumps, obstacles, and plot holes.

Through it all, I’ve been writing. We got through the economic crisis, the pandemic, and several changes in government – both here in Spain and back in the US.

And the excitement shows no signs of stopping, or even slowing down.

Life, as they say, is just one damn thing after another.

Twenty years of life in Spain

This week I’m celebrating 20 years of life in Spain.

Twenty years! That is, by most standards, a long time.

One of the other reasons I wrote my novel back in the early part of the century was to make sense of some of the things that happened to me growing up. Articles like this do the same thing.

If you have some sort of brilliant life plan that you’re following, year after year, good for you.

‘Cause I’m doing no such thing. I have short and mid-term goals, and a vision of a better long-term future. But that vision is pretty vague, and could take a number of forms.

Life is largely plotless. But by writing about your experience, you can turn a series of loosely interconnected events into a plausible narrative with a why, and hopefully learn something in hindsight.

From the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset I learned (back in my National Library days) that there are fundamentally two types of people: those who make great demands upon themselves, and live an effortful life, and those who are just content to be as they are: “mere buoys that float on the waves”.

I was, pretty clearly, the first type.

The fact that I was at the National Library reading a philosophy book at all should have tipped me off. (A philosophy book written in a foreign language I’d learned largely on my own, incidentally.)

Looking back, I’m not sure that any of this sounds like “normal behavior” for a guy in his early 20s. But being normal is overrated. I just wanted to develop my potential in some way, and avoid working a 9 to 5. And I did.

How to move abroad and live to tell the tale

Of course, a lot else has happened in 20 years.

I’ve got articles about some of the key points.

I spent my share of time indulging in youthful stupidity, dated plenty of Spanish girls, almost destroyed my liver, turned 40 (with all the things that come with that), got married, and bought a house. I even tried to integrate into Spanish culture – and mostly failed.

As usual, I’m tempted to write some inane list post for this occasion – “20 things I’ve learned in 20 years of life abroad”. But then I remember that I’ve been doing this “living abroad and writing about it” thing since long before AirBnb, before Instagram, and before Digital Nomads.

If you wanted to make “travel” your whole personality 20 years ago, you could. But there was no way to broadcast it to everyone you’d ever met (and many people you hadn’t). You’d go somewhere, and end up sleeping in some dingy hostal you’d seen in a Lonely Planet guide, and if you wanted to tell someone about it, you’d write them a postcard.

I remember those days. In other words, I’m old school. And I might as well embrace it.

Back to my roots…

The other day someone actually asked me where I’d started my rather strange journey from dropout to freelance writer (etc), and I told the truth: it was in the library. The public library, back in Phoenix. With books.

I sometimes wish teenage Daniel had had a better idea about what he wanted to do with his life, but he was just really into books. And that explains a lot of what came after: writing that awful novel, my “career” as a grammar guy, this blog. And I’m just getting started here.

That’s why this bit of middle-aged introspection is about, of all things, my life as a writer, more than my life as an American abroad.

Reading taught me pretty early on that I didn’t have to limit myself to what was visible within my own horizons – or the horizons of those around me. Because luckily, a lot of smarter people than myself have taken the time to write down their thoughts and visions, and share them with the world. I’m grateful for all of them.

From Marcus Aurelius to Bill Bryson, about 2000 years of authors have sat down to share their world view. And I’ve got nothing but gratitude – and several shelves full of their collected wisdom.

Thanks for reading. (And for writing.)

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. There are plenty of links throughout this article, but if you want some more, check out my piece on Why Americans Love Spain. Or my thoughts on living in Madrid and Barcelona. Enjoy!