A couple years ago, back when I was stuck in Venezuela during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working on a prospective book project documenting the past 20+ years or so of Venezuela’s socialist tragedy from my “non-normie” and rather atypical “pariah” perspective, seeing as I was 11 years old when Hugo Chávez took office. I was working on this thanks to the help of an absolute king, who I’m very grateful for.
Unfortunately, due to a series of circumstances beyond our control, this project fell apart, and I kinda stopped pursuing it from 2022 onwards, as I spent much of that year working towards successfully attaining Italian citizenship, which I got towards the end of that year.
After I left Venezuela in January 2024 I started entertaining the idea of finishing the project on my own after I was done publishing Sword of Vaifen — the thing is that, I kinda started to loathe the idea of potentially being yet another guy out there that profited from our collective tragedy. I’m still unsure on the matter, it’s just that I’ve seen many such cases that kinda left a sour taste, I don’t really know how best to explain it.
I’ve been rather stuck at getting Sword out of beta-reader limbo, so as to distract myself from that I finally started retrieving as much of the original notes as I could find scattered across email attachments and old file backups. I took as much as I could use, retooled it to have more of a personal tale while keeping some of the Venezuelan-centric focus of the original project, and assembled it all together as an online series of entries with a new title: Record of a Venezuelan Pariah.
I’m pleased to say that I plan to release it on this very website… RIGHT NOW!
You can find it by clicking here, or by clicking “Record of a Venezuelan Pariah” on the Site Content submenu in the top bar.
The original project was circa late 2020 – early 2021, so as to not have it end abruptly I added two entries that are essentially a compilation of my experiences during COVID and the 2022 Italian Passport saga. The epilogue is also brand new, since no such epilogue was written for it. Additionally, I added three “Extra Record” entries that aren’t chronological unlike the book’s ten chapters — think of them as post-game DLC or something, lol.
I updated much of the original notes and updated some things here and there. There are some missing parts and anecdotes still, so it’s likely I’ll add those as time permits — but as it stands, this is the most complete and honest account of the past 26 years of my life, this is the most I’ve written about myself at once, so I hope you like it.
Who knows, maybe I do get to publish a “professional” version of this with all the bells and whistles that the original plan called for — but this version, which I’m releasing today will get me something you cannot put a price on: Closure. If something comes out this release is great, if not that’s fine too.
Please give it a read at your earliest convenience, and apologize if there are some grammar errors still, don’t forget that English isn’t my native language and now I’m further frying my brain by trying to cram Italian on it alongside Spanish. It’s not professionally edited (other than the few surviving parts that were), so I’ll clean it up over time.
I don’t have much else to say other than to thank God first and foremost and thank you all, friends and strangers alike, for everything, really.
-Kal
