Sydney Harbour Hospital:
Tom’s Redemption is a stand-alone book as well as being the fourth book in
the exciting Sydney Harbour Hospital Series. As it’s part of a series, the
character bios are given to the authors and we are to brand and make those
characters our own. Imagine my stunned surprise when I opened up Tom Jordan’s bio and read, ‘blind
neurosurgeon’!
I read it
twice, did a mental scream and then gave myself the same advice I give my kids
when they are faced with something they have to do but are not keen to do
it….’suck it up and get on with it.’
At first,
a blind hero struck me as very hard to make sexy. I also realized in my writing
I often use long glances and descriptions of eyes and that was lost to me. To overcome all this, I had to really think outside the box to come
up with images to model Tom on and I came up with two very sexy men!
How was a
man who was at the top of his field professionally and in what is considered
the top field of medicine – neurosurgery— going to feel when he lost his sight
and by default, everything that defined him? Angry? Lost? Lashing out at those
around him? James Dean in his black leathers immediately came to mind. Another
reason why James Dean worked for Tom was because he’d clawed his way to the top
not just in his field of medicine but in life. Tom had grown up on the wrong
side of the tracks and at fourteen was the boy most likely to end up in a youth
training centre.
The first
time Hayley, the heroine meets Tom he is dressed in black from top to toe….
With his
black clothes, black hair, bladed cheek bones, a slightly crooked nose and a
delicious cleft in his stubble-covered chin, he cut a striking image against
the white of the walls. Striking and slightly unnerving. He wasn’t a fatherly
figure like Gerry the maintenance man in his overalls nor did he have the
easy-going manner of Theo. Neither of those men ever put her on edge.
Even so,
despite her thread of anxiety, she would have had to be blind not to recognise
he was handsome in a rugged, rough-edged kind of a way, and that was part of
her unease. She had the feeling that his clothes were just a veneer of
gentrification. Remove them and a raw energy would be unleashed that would
sweep up everything in its path.
An unbidden image of him naked exploded in her
mind, stirring a prickle of sensation deep down inside her. It wasn’t fear and
that scared her even more.
So bad
boy, James Dean worked perfectly for
Tom at the start of the book but he wasn’t going to work from the halfway
point. My subconscious must have been digging deep because suddenly I
remembered a very young Hugo Weaving
in the movie, Proof.
He played a blind
man and he was gorgeous. Slightly
tousled and tie askew, he was the perfect representation of the surgeon turned
lecturer. If you’ve not seen Proof, it’s
worth getting it out because as well as a sexy, young Hugo Weaving, there is a
very young Russell Crowe! You can catch a trailer on You Tube http://youtu.be/AixgCHv2N7I Best line of
the film…he is being examined after being in a car accident and the doctor
examines him and says, ‘You’re blind so why were you driving?’ to which he
replies, ‘I forgot.’
Writing this book
took me out of my comfort zone and I worried Tom wasn’t going to be the sexy
hero that readers demand but drawing from James Dean and Hugo Weaving, I am
thrilled to say that reader mail is telling me that Tom is divine. The best
compliment I got was from the Mills & Boon website where a
reader wrote, “I'm not normally a fan of a disabled hero but the
compelling and fascinating Tom is the exception.
Can anyone tell me about a disabled hero they’ve loved?
Fiona
Lowe is an award-winning, multi-published
author with Harlequin and Carina Press. Whether her books are set in outback Australia or in the
mid-west of the USA, they feature small towns with big hearts, and warm,
likeable characters that make you fall in love. When she's not writing stories,
she's a weekend wife, mother of two 'ginger' teenage boys, guardian of 80 rose
bushes and often found collapsed on the couch. A current RT Book Reviewers'
Choice Award and RITA nominee, you can find her at her website, facebook, Twitter and Goodreads.
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