A healer on the run…
When James first discovers he can heal, he thinks he has a rare and miraculous gift. But when he learns the price, it feels more like a curse. He falls passionately and completely in love with every person he heals. But only until he heals again, when he becomes hotly infatuated with the next person. He doesn’t dare express feelings he knows are only transitory or hold out hope anyone will love him back under those conditions. He keeps moving, hiding his gift, doing what good he can, always in secret.
One night, he meets Ambient, the victim of a car accident, dying, his neck broken. James heals him despite knowing what is in store. He can’t resist Ambient, and to his amazement, Ambient returns his feelings. Thinking Ambient has broken the curse, James heals the next injured person he comes across. To his joy, and confusion, he does not fall in love anew. If anything, his feelings toward Ambient intensify. Awash with the certainty that somehow, he and Ambient are meant for each other, they set out to learn the truth about James’s strange power.
Parts of this story have been around for a long time.
I originally wrote the beginning of this book as a short story called “The Rosebud,” which was published in 2010 by Torquere Press. It was one of many short stories written by Torquere authors as a benefit to raise money for LGBTQ friendly charities. That year, the beneficiary was Doctors Without Borders, and the theme for the stories, appropriately, was healing. My story was about a young man who could literally heal with his hands, and it got some lovely reviews. Many readers wanted to see more of my characters, and I realized I wanted to learn more about them, too. So I carried on where the short story left off, and the novel Another Healing took shape. It was published in 2014 by Dreamspinner Press, and it was a finalist in the 2015 Rainbow Awards.
It turned out that the characters wouldn’t let go of me even after that, so now Another Healing is the first book in a series by the same name. The second book, Depth of Return, won first place in the gay paranormal romance category of the 2017 Rainbow Awards.
I’m really excited to be self-publishing Another Healing now. Depth of Return will follow shortly, and at some point, I promise, the long awaited third book in the series will appear. Now that I hold the rights to all my novels again, a flood gate has opened in my mind, and I’m seeing visions of healers meeting dragons! And owls… doing whatever owls want to do because they’re owls and they’re cool that way.
And I’m so excited about the cover. I loved the old cover very much, for sure, but I needed a new one for this self-published edition. I thought about working with a cover artist, but I kind of wanted to try doing it myself. I don’t really think of myself as an artist, but I have been a semi-professional photographer for years (I’ve been in a few magazines, including Vermont Life) and sold some prints and cards and that sort of stuff. I known about composition. And most importantly, my husband is very computer-savvy. We bought Photoshop and got to work. Another Healing is our second cover–the first was for a YA novel I published under a different name. I come up with the elements and put them in place, and he tweaks things like the bevel on the text and makes sure it has the right amount of pixels or whatever to make Amazon happy. For this book, I started looking at images of roads, and guys, but I wanted to convey magic and healing, and then I stumbled across images of healing hands, and I realized I’d found what I wanted. I think it really fits the book–there’s even a scene where James conjures light in his palm, and by doing so, makes an important point about himself. The other books in the series will have similar, but different, hands. Getting to work on Depth of Return now….