Rachel's Request: A Photograph of Peru

I am supposed to be working on my query letter and synopsis so I can begin contacting publishers and agents regarding my novel Chasing Shadows.  Instead, I find myself sitting at my desk with my photo album from Peru open on my lap and photoshop open on the computer.  In my head I keep hearing Rachel say that she’d like to see a picture of Peru.  Yes, that is me and my distracted mind.  Rachel was kind enough to take a look at my query letter and synopsis and offer some incredibly helpful feedback so that I could make myself and my novel sound more marketable.  She left me with a page of great notes and awesome advice, but right now I can’t seem to be able to move beyond the fact that she thought it would be cool to include a picture of Peru – probably because working on my pictures is more fun than spilling my blood, sweat and tears into a letter and summary that will most likely be swallowed up by some unknown person’s delete key.  Rachel suggested a picture of Peru since that is part of the setting of my novel.  

Eleven years ago I backpacked through the country and came home with the plot of a novel brewing in my brain.  The novel is not even close to being a memoir but much of what happens in the novel is true or based on reality – either mine or other peoples.  I took a multitude of real life men and women and sculpted them into a handful of characters.  Many of the experiences my characters have in Peru are actually my own adventures viewed through a fictional lens.   As a result, this novel could never have come to be had I not attempted to escape the reality of my own existence during the summer of 2002.  While in Huaraz I met a young man who had just spend several months volunteering at an orphanage in Guatemala, I trekked with an Israeli couple and the three of us got lost in the Andes, I randomly ran into a Spaniard whom I had met years before in Asia, and my heart broke every time poor kids came begging for change.  All of this, and more, influenced  the shape and scope of my novel.  Like many trips before, I came home a different person than I had been previously because as all backpackers know, travel and growth are synonymous.  But how could I find one picture to define my experience, one picture to represent all that Peru had come to mean, one picture that would encapsulate the meaning of my novel.  I didn’t think I could, until I came upon one of five boys playing soccer on an island in Lake Titicaca.  Even though Peru itself is much greater than this one minute memory, it was this scene that became the foundation, the driving force behind my novel.  Had I not sat and watched these boys play soccer I may never have had a complete story to tell.

Working with pictures that I took before I owned a digital camera is always a challenge.  Scanned photos are not of the same quality as digital ones, but despite the limitations of the photograph, I believe it captures the essence of the moment.  And the quote by Dostoyevsky could not have been better, for it seems to define the experience of my main character almost perfectly.