The Five-Year Itch

How many times can you burn your life down before...

Before what?

First, I wrote: you are called an arsonist? Then: the soil becomes contaminated?

But neither made sense because I wasn’t thinking about crimes, or charred, dead ends, but the opposite - new beginnings and growth.

This has been my professional bio for the last five years or so:

My work has been published - in English and Spanish - in magazines and anthologies around the world. I hold the Master's in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. I'm from the UK, but I live in Madrid, Spain. I work as an editor at a large publisher.

For those five years it did its job, succinctly encapsulating most areas of my life as a writer and an editor. However, a few weeks ago, I quit my job at that large publisher, and I realised that every five years or so - in my life thus far - I have done something similar.

Five years after graduating from university, I left my steady job in IT (IT?!) to open a vintage shop and arts space. I sold my flat and abandoned the more settled life I’d embarked upon after leaving university. Five years after that, I visited Madrid for the first time and fell in love with the city. A few years later, I closed my shop and left the UK to move to Madrid permanently. Once here, I started writing. I was fascinated by the idea that I was now a legitimate foreigner, versus the outsider on home turf that I had always felt myself to be in England. I started writing about that, about outsiderness and its many permutations and, another five years later, graduated from the creative writing programme, and started working at Santillana, the large Spanish publisher.

Also around that time I started a writing group in Madrid. One of the people I met there is still a friend. About six months ago we were having a coffee, and he was telling me about all the changes in his life recently, including the arrival of two new babies. There was a pause in the conversation and he looked at me for a longer-than-average moment and said: ‘Your life hasn’t really changed all that much has it?’ he wasn’t being cruel, we'd first met just as my last wave of big changes had crashed and settled on the shore, so to him my life had always been one way and one way only. I’m not blaming him for deciding to quit my job (ha!), change is normal in any and all lives and, on top of that, I know I have a tendency to restlessness. But, I do think he planted a seed.

Previous to that conversation, I had already started to feel really antsy, but it intensified after that throwaway comment. It bothered me that someone would see me as so inured to the ennui because I didn't feel that was who I was. I channeled that fidgety energy into writing and editing projects. I finished a novella I had been working on for a few years (about outsiderness, of course!) and started to expand my freelance portfolio - looking for new and interesting projects. For a while I was massively busy doing three jobs at once and waiting for the moment when it would feel right to make the leap from steady employment to self-employment.

It felt like I was waiting for a long time and, having been more impulsive in the past, I wondered what was stopping me. Until - as so often happens - my body took over and told my mind what to do. I was getting my backpack ready for the trip to the office one morning, or trying to; every time I went to collect it from where it was stored, something physically stopped me and I just turned around and walked out of the room again. That’s when I knew the moment had come to hand in my notice. My body had had enough, it was demanding change.

I recently wrote about alternative life choices and whether or not I was kidding myself that I could make this shift to self-employment work out. It’s not like I’ve had the most unusual life, but neither has it been all that staid. I suppose I tend to follow my heart and, more recently, this from Miranda July: ‘Fear stasis and spending this one life frozen in a crouched position, not wanting to get in trouble.’ Now both have led me to writing this in a sunny little room at the top of my apartment building, under the eaves. It’s cocoon-like but also gives me a feeling of freedom and expansion; Madrid’s blue Velázquian sky and the light and the height all combining to lift me upwards - a boat at the crest of a wave.

As you can see, I’ve gone through a few changes career-wise, but writing and editing is where I'm happiest (‘What my talents fit me for and my interests draw me to’ as A.C. Grayling put it) and the point from which I want to keep building up and out. With that in mind, allow me to formally introduce myself as your potential future editor, mentor or pen for hire.

Below is a summary of the types of things I've worked on in the past.

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Editing:

• I worked as an editor at Santillana, a large Spanish publisher, for five years.

• I’m the in-house Development Editor at Modern Odyssey Books. (I’m also helping with their Substack, please feel free to subscribe!)

• I’ve volunteered as an editor with literary publications such as: Transnational Literature, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Litro Magazine and the London Writers’ Salon yearly anthology.

Writing:

• Some of my proudest publishing credits include: Prairie Schooner, ‘Casio, 1984’ (USA) | Aesthetica, ‘The History of Beauty and Ugliness’ (UK) | Motorcycle Sport and Leisure Magazine, ‘The Marshalls’ (UK)

• In summer 2025, a collection of my essays and short stories will be published by Modern Odyssey Books.

• Coming soon: a regular column on the craft of writing for The Madrid Review.

To learn more about me and my work, please visit my website or view my portfolio, or LinkedIn. If you would like to get an idea of my writing style, you can also take a look at my Substack home page.

If you want to talk about how to move your writing project forward, you can message me here with any questions. I’d be delighted to talk to you.

And, hey, don’t take it from me! Look at what these lovely people have to say on my Testimonials page!

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Now back to our scheduled programming.

I would love to hear other stories of change and growth and restlessness and wilful fire-setting.

I know I’m not the only one with this propensity, so c'mon, tell me about your acts of arson!