The Freedom of Obscurity
Darick Allan's blogspace
‘The Prisoner of Zone 22’
Current chapter – Fourteen of 64.
Phantoms
INTRO
A beautiful woman appears suddenly one night at a police station in Guatemala City. She demands to be put away for a murder she has yet to commit. Captain Javier Ixtlan finds himself in an impossible situation: it opens doors into his past and the roles of powerful men who destroyed his family and much of the country.
The Freedom of Obscurity
Isak Dineson once wrote that obscurity is the privilege of young things. But obscurity can last a lifetime and with it comes an extraordinary freedom. It’s not a freedom many artists choose. I certainly didn’t. I tried many times to find a publisher and an agent without success. Over the years I came to realize that my work did not fit what they were looking for and it gave me an unusual advantage. It allowed me to develop without fear of rejection, and really without fear at all. An imagination without fear is open to anything.
This blog is a way of putting decades of my work into the world. The books consist of novels and memoirs, and I will be publishing them in weekly posts of about 2,000 words for the next several years. By accident I made a living in the art world. The first two memoirs I post will be about my experiences in that unusual plane. The novels that follow are mostly set in Latin America, where I grew up. The agents I sent them to couldn’t make heads or tails of them and considered them untouchable. Hopefully we’ll see about that.