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L
O S T S O U L
S
By David M.
Fitzpatrick
Word Count: About 122,500 words
I've been writing books since I was a
kid, but two years ago I began a project that has consumed much of my free
time. What began as an attempt to write a screenplay for the fun of it
quickly transformed into a novel that has changed my life. The completed
book, Lost Souls, is complete, and I have begun putting out feelers
to agents.
The Story
Jennifer Sheridan lives a nearly
perfect life—until someone brutally kills her. She awakens in the body of
another woman, one who has been raped and beaten nearly to death, and
embarks on a supernatural mission: to find her own killer, to discover who
apparently killed the woman whose body she inhabits, and to learn why she
ended up in this woman’s body. Along the way, she battles against everyone
she knows and loves in a hopeless attempt to convince them all she’s
really the women they buried two months before.
Told predominately in the first-person
POV, there is no doubt to Jen or us that she is absolutely who she claims
she is. She has every detailed memory of Jen’s life. But who is the woman
whose body she inhabits? What happened to her life force?
Her bizarre resurrection serves only to
exacerbate her strange identity disorder. At stake are her family, her
friends, her life, and maybe her sanity. Along the way, the biggest
scientific and philosophical question of all begs to be answered: Why and
how did this strange transfer of life forces happen? What will come of it?
How does it all relate to her long-time identity disorder? When all is
said and done, Jen understands.
The story occasionally departs from Jen’s
narrative to focus on the rapist/killer. The book opens with him striking
two victims, and throughout the book he is without guilt or remorse, and
steadily slips deeper into depravity and utter evil as he moves from
victim to victim. And along the way, he knows one victim he left for dead
is still alive. It’s the woman who now claims to be a dead Bangor police
officer. And he’s coming for her.
The Characters
The main characters are:
- Jennifer Sheridan, the
protagonist, is a police officer in Bangor, Maine. She lives in a the
rural Maine town of Tarrington.
- Derek Sheridan, Jen’s husband,
lives for his business, Jen, and their infant daughter, Mindy.
- April Rice is Jen’s best friend
since childhood, the one who has always been there and knows everything
about her.
- Annie Monson is Jen’s young
sister, on her way to summer college classes in New Hampshire, afraid to
leave everyone, and certain that she’d rather hook up with a man than
the boys she knows she’ll find at school.
- Helen Monson is Jen’s mother,
apparently afraid of talking about any skeletons in the family’s closet,
and upset at Jen’s questions about whether there was anything traumatic
in her childhood that perhaps she’d forgotten.
- Don Franklin is Jen’s police
chief, a gruff man who once made a drunken pass at her at a Christmas
party.
- Bob Travis works for Derek, and
has always creeped Jen out with weird, infatuated stares.
- Johnny Martin runs the rural
convenience store, and has had a crush on her since high school, even
though she’s now married. He is the last person who saw Jen alive.
- Shirley Wallace is her
counselor, trying to keep Jen focused and deal with her insecurities and
strange personality disorder.
- The Killer who raped and left
for dead the woman whose body Jen now inhabits knows that woman was not
dead, and plans to finish the job. Along the way, he grows more evil and
depraved, and more daring as he claims his victims.
The Process
For those of you keeping score,
this was a challenge in many ways:
First, it's in the first person.
In many ways, the first person is the best way to tell a story; with one
major protagonist, there's no better way to get into your character's
head. The drawback is that you can't get into anyone else's. Because I
wanted the reader to have no doubt Jen is who she thinks she is, this was
the only way to do it. However, occasional jumps to the third person POV
of the killer were necessary. I don't think I'm breaking new ground with
this, but it is something of a literary risk. In the end, I feel it works
very well. Along the way, third person present scenes describe Jen's
dreams and flashbacks, for a disassociated feel.
Second, my protagonist is a woman.
Way too often, men who write with female protagonists just don't get it;
they end up being female characters that are nothing more than male
characters with breasts. I was determined not to let this happen, and so
focused on having several various women brutally critique the book. Thanks
to Elaine, my wife, for reading it several times, and catching me having
my protagonist come across too male in many instances--and for giving me
some lessons on living on Planet Female. Also, special thanks to Kate
England for grand feminine insights, and to my sister-in-law Andrea for
observations about maternal behavior that I completely missed.
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