Seven years.
Today I hit the submit button sending the final draft of Shepherds of Lost Things out to a handful of publishers. Given that there are a lot of incredibly talented writers chasing a limited number of opportunities and even fewer literary agents… I’m not expecting to hear back from anyone I contacted today. That’s okay with me.
Just finishing the novel was enough. I spent far too many years making excuses why it wasn’t the right time. Next week. When I have a better writing setup. When life isn’t so busy. It took a global pandemic to get me to stop making excuses and just sit down and write. I put a whole damn novel together on an iPad. No more excuses.
With my first novel, The Heart of Lightspeed, I was juggling two decades worth of ideas while learning how to organize and draft out a novel. It was like building train tracks under a moving train. I spent a long time just figuring out what methods, processes, and tools worked for me. While I ended up using Ulysses for my day to day project management, the final editing (with MUCH assistance from my lovely wife) was done in Apple’s Pages because it supported multiple user edits and page layouts. Just getting to that point felt like climbing Mt. Everest with bungie cords.
But the story of Shepherds of Lost Things doesn’t start in the fall of 2021 after I self published my first novel. It starts on a dark cold night seven years earlier in a coffee shop nestled in the heart of downtown Portland. While waiting for my future wife to finish working late I sat alone with a blank screen and a blinking cursor trying to think of a story that went with a premise I had, “What if a serial killer wasn’t taking trophies, but was hunting for something specific? How would the cops figure it out and stop them?”
There amongst roasted beans came the bones of a story: Rakshasa, a killer on the hunt for something lost; Wendy Bataille, a detective facing mandatory medical retirement who wants to put one final killer away; and John, a man with fantastical abilities who is the key to solving the crime spree.
I wish that that first draft was something I could share, so you could see how much things changed over the years, but I lost it during a Google Docs migration. Thus I found myself starting over with pen and paper in July of 2018. Across 32 notecards I laid out the entire story from every character introduction, action moment, dramatic twists, murderous mysteries, and the final stunning conclusion.
It was then that a minor side character, FBI Agent Catalina Davidson, emerged. She was supposed to be the thorn in our detective’s side as they tried to catch a killer. However, over time I found that the book needed a character who can ask the questions readers will have. Without Catalina there, the answers sounded like a wikipedia entries dumped on the reader by Wendy. Catalina was the one stepping off the beaten path into the unknown, just like my readers. So her point of view made far more sense than Wendy’s. Now that she was the main character, what was the point of Wendy?
The answer to what to do with Wendy eluded me. She was too interesting to drop entirely, but she needed a reason to exist beyond introducing Catalina to John. I really struggled with not wanting to lose her in the margins. Then I turned 40. Suddenly the passing of the guard seemed obvious to me. Wendy was the grizzled veteran and Catalina was the young face stepping up to the plate. Like two ships passing in the night they made for perfect bookends to the story.
That just left John. There was never a version where he wasn’t the lynchpin the story turned on, but how much of his background to bring into the mix was always a debate. Too little and people wonder why he gets so much ink. Too much and he crowds out everything else. I’ve settled on many hints and few straight up answers. No lies though. John never lies. Thus leaving things wide open for the second book, Shepherds of Fragile Creatures.
At first the plan was always to lean on gothic horror as the trio chased a serial killer across Chicago, but when laid out on note cards the story became “they go to a crime scene” then “they go to a crime scene” followed by “they got to a crime scene.” Boring. It didn’t help that I found trying to craft detailed and interesting crime scenes to be like pulling my own teeth. So rather quickly I decided that the story needed more action.
Putting a grizzled police veteran like Wendy into harms way never felt right, but with Catalina as the main character it felt like “of course the newbie FBI agent would stumble into danger while chasing a killer.” Now filled with heart pounding action that includes shootouts, knife fights, and an epic car chase the novel now more than earns the “thriller” in “Mystery-Thriller.”
Those thrilling action scenes now have quite a lot of supernatural moments in them. I always planned on supernatural elements bleeding through the crime scenes to make things extra mysterious, but how far to go with them without confusing readers has been a challenge. In the end Shepherds of Lost Things is a very gentle introduction into a much stranger and larger world. Because of this it’s a novel that finds itself better suited for adult readers who enjoy a dash of the supernatural in their fiction versus a title for “young adults.”
When will readers get to go on this adventure through the weird side of Chicago? Next year. I’ll have either details to share about being published, or my plans for self-publishing later this year. Fingers crossed
It’s been a long journey from that blank page.
Here’s to the last steps.
Ross Weisfish 