Hey there, it’s been a while since I posted something on my own website, hasn’t it? Almost six months, to be precise.
This is, by far, the largest lapse in content I’ve had since I launched this website in mid-2017, and for that I wholeheartedly apologize, but it’s been an interesting six months, to say the least.
Working on rewriting my novel’s draft from scratch (more info on that soon), some positive job-related upgrades at the cost of less free time and juggling between different things around here in Italy got me all sorts of occupied. Then there’s tax stuff, my brother’s slow but steady disability paperwork process, etc.
I know it’s not an excuse, but that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since October — well, that, and dealing with my worsening thyroid issues + a Hashimoto’s diagnosis that I’ve been taking care of (more on that soon too, I promise).
This is just a brief announcement to let people know that I still intend to post more stuff on this site beyond Venezuela-related stuff. A lot has changed over the past two months, yes, but I believe I don’t get to say much about it, considering I’m no longer living inside the country, and me writing about my experiences from inside Venezuela was the original reason that I launched this website for.
This, by no means is an indication that I’ll stop talking about my birthplace, just that I’m focusing on building something new, like my novel, and I’m exploring other things to do on this journey of mine.
I also feel like I “wrapped up” 30+ years of my life in Venezuela with Record of a Venezuelan Pariah last year. For those that do not know, between 2020 and 2021 I was working on writing a book narrating life in Venezuela under my perspective. This project unfortunatedly fell apart years ago.
After I moved to Italy, I grabbed whatever drafts I could find among my backups, removed most of the statistical/investigative stuff (which was mostly incomplete by the time the project fell apart either way) and kept all the personal stories.
This, I believe, gave me a bit of closure from all that happened; it lessened the burden of regret, but it still a bit heavy, I must confess.
Over the past days I’ve been slowly revamping things under the hood, replacing old plugins, deleting others, and trying to get things snappier and more up to date. Do pardon the mess if I accidentally break something. I have some roadblocks because I had the brilliant idea of using Elementor to publish basically everything since 2018 onwards, and now all that old content is basically tied to a plugin that has become extremely sluggish for me. I’m trying to see if there’s a way I can migrate all that legacy content to new standards, if not, I’ll keep it as-is, nothing changes, though it might be a bit janky that’s all.
Nuclear option would be to redo the blog and keep this as a separate archival installation, but that seems like too much work for little gains.
Either way, expect more stuff soon, but right now, my focus when it comes to content creation is getting Sword of Vaifen finally published. It’s been too long, too many failed attempts, but I’m bound to get it right eventually, I hope. I’ll most likely be writing about this whole thyroid ordeal of mine, and some new ramblings on being legally a citizen, but functionally a migrant.
All the best, and keep on keeping on,
-Kal
