Guest Post: Who Am I by Erika Rummel

Who am I? It’s difficult to answer that question when you play multiple roles every day – housewife, mother, career woman, lover. Are you that caring kiss-you-better person, or that authority figure, or that gourmet chef, or that sex kitten?

Who am I? is the question Lisa asks in HEAD GAMES, but instead of looking inside herself for an answer, she makes the mistake of looking into the mirror of other people’s eyes. Don wants her to be his baby doll, Jim wants her to be his lover, and the spiritualist Santos wants her to be a medium to attract his missing sister.

HEAD GAMES is not only a journey into the strange and mysterious north country of Argentina. It is also a journey into Lisa’s head, the landscape of her crazy imagination and the only place where the existential question Who am I? can be resolved.

Is HEAD GAMES autobiographical? Yes, I’ve lived and traveled in Argentina. The description of the wild country on the border of Bolivia is authentic, as is the threatening political climate in the early ‘80s when Argentines lived under the iron fist of the military junta.

In some ways, Lisa is me. In others, she isn’t. Unlike her, I am suspicious of spiritualists and séances. And I wouldn’t fall for a creepy old man like Don, who wants to play sugar daddy. Lisa gets kidnapped in Argentina and lives the life of a captive in a Quechua family compound. Nothing like that happened to me. But like Lisa, I am trying to figure out Who am I? What do I want to out of life?

HEAD GAMES has a happy ending, and that’s what I love about novel writing: You can make it up. Lisa’s life is a fast-paced, thrilling story with a beginning, middle, and end. My life is full of inexplicable twists and turns going who knows where. Lisa ends up knowing who she is. I’m still searching!

PS: If you are into the question Who am I, you’ll also enjoy my novel PLAYING NAOMI, in which Liz, an out-of-work actress, impersonates Naomi Baum, a reclusive millionaire. She plays her role so well that she attracts all the passions meant for the real Naomi. Ted romances her. Miro plots her murder. Things are getting out of hand. Maybe it’s time for Liz to slip back into her old life and her old self? Or is it too late, and has she turned into Naomi?

Find more about Erika Rummel and her fiction at: http://www.erikarummel.com