The book is done. Published. Available. Temporary Access, twelve stories about women navigating borders that exist on passports, screens, and inside consciousness.
I finished writing it in October. Spent November wondering if anyone would want to read stories told through chat logs and visa applications. Spent early December checking the proof copies obsessively, finding typos I’d somehow missed in fifteen read-throughs.
Now the book exists independently of me. Strange feeling.
Temporary Access grew from a year when borders kept closing and opening unpredictably. QR codes determined where you could go, who you could see, which version of yourself you were allowed to access. I watched people negotiate visa centres, quarantine protocols, digital platforms. Watched them translate between languages and between versions of themselves.
The twelve women move between Vologda, Beijing, London, Moscow. A hotline operator bends the rules. A warehouse worker finds a hidden note in a parcel from Shenzhen. A student discovers her Chinese name unlocks a bolder self. A visa centre translator chooses silence over accuracy to protect someone she’ll never see again.
I wrote in fragments because that’s how digital life actually works. Chat screenshots, voice message transcripts, visa forms. Russian, English, Mandarin mixed together the way they mix in actual conversations when you’re code-switching between contexts.
The title means what it says. Every character holds temporary permissions: work visas, probationary roles, quarantine passes. The question isn’t whether the system grants permanent access. It’s which self you choose to carry forward when the temporary window closes.
This is my first published book. I have an MSc in Marketing and years of nail work with London’s elite, but no MFA, no formal fiction training. Just notebooks full of observations about the gap between who people present and who they actually are when the performance drops.
Publishing feels like submitting a visa application. You prepare everything carefully, send it off, wait to see if you’re granted entry. Except the border control here is readers, and I have no idea what they’ll decide.
Temporary Access is available now on Kobo and through other major retailers. Paperback and digital formats.
If you read it, I’d genuinely want to know which story landed. Not for promotional purposes. Because I’m still figuring out whether this translation from observation to fiction actually works.
Posted from London, where everything feels both permanent and provisional.
— Writer Julia Zolotova
