Hector A. Ruiz

I have spent the last days organizing files from my old backups. Really old backups.

Not surprisingly I ran into all of my other books and drafts I have written in my life. I didn’t count how many I had in total because I was fast-clicking and sorting them very quickly, but I estimate there are probably fifteen of them. I opened a few of them, read a few pages and two things struck me: 1) I have drafts that dated over twenty five years ago, and still you can tell by their writing, that they came from me. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, but my writing style has definitely been consistent in time. 2) Despite having great and interesting ideas in most of them, I left them unfinished because I ran into a writer’s block (is that’s what it’s called?), and I never came back to them again.

Maybe I should quit being a baby and start working on them again. Maybe I can finish all of them. But I have to publish this one first!

HR

I haven’t posted anything about my book in the past months… mostly due to me having to adapt to working from home, my workload that thankfully I must
say has been huge and I’m happy that’s the way it is, and of course the new set of priorities that come with this new way of life. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been working on my baby.

As I stated in my previous update about my book, I’m taking this time to go over the finished manuscript, revise it once again, making sure I’m happy with
everything, and also conducting research on all the topics I covered, as well as the analytical approach I discuss throughout all its chapters. Part of this research includes having finished reading a book called “Once Upon a Revolution” about the series of protests that took place in Egypt to remove Hosni Mubarak as president, and the subsequent transition that led to Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s election as current president. I bought this book because I thought it would be similar to mine, but found out it lacked the social analysis that I focus on in Venezuela’s case. The initial stage of the events that took place in Egypt are quite similar to those that happened in Venezuela, however about a third into the book, the parallelisms began to diverge from each other.

It was an interesting read altogether, but sadly I must say that I couldn’t draw too much of it to use into my book. Still, my congratulations to the author. Hopefully one day he’ll be able to get his hands on my book and tell me what he thinks about it.

HR