After I finished writing the final Healing Season book, I had an existential crisis. There are actually 5 books because I was having a hard time letting go of the characters that helped heal me…although very few people actually know about that 5th book, unless you personally know me, or you’re if stumbling through a random website that was clearly not designed by a professional web-designer. I am disabled so I have a lot of time on my hands. Once I became unable to work, finding some kind of purpose in my life was an all-consuming thought that often felt like falling into a bottomless pit. It was drilled into my head growing up that a person’s worth is tied to their financial contribution to their household. It took years of work with my psychologist, and just as many hours of reassurance, love, and support from my husband Harrison, to adjust my outlook so that I could still find worth within myself even though I no longer had an income.

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     Writing was where I finally found some purpose again. Through writing The Healing Season, I was able to rediscover part of myself that was buried under decades of trauma and loss… Which means you can imagine the abject terror that tried to strangle me to death when I finished writing and editing the series. I think I cried every morning for weeks because all the years that I was happily writing The Healing Season books, I was never bored—I could be sitting in a loud movie theater, others would think I was watching the movie, but my mind was actually mapping out a scene—the new boredom rapidly evolved into wondering if maybe my life was actually purposeless after all.

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     Trying to bail me out of my self-pity spiral, my friend Anne suggested that I should try my hand at binding my own works into hardcover books. She knew I felt too intimidated to publish at that time but knew it would help me to have a tangible book, without me having to take the scary step of going to Kindle or trying to find an agent. She kept pushing me and sending me ideas which eventually convinced me that it might be a fun new skill to keep my hands busy while I came to terms with actually publishing. I took online classes to learn how to format, I learned how to get my Word documents into PDFs and organize them into signatures, how to add artwork into my books, how to bind, and how to use an airbrush (which admittedly, still needs work). Then I spent months learning to use Canva to design my covers, developing skill after skill. When it was actually time to put all the new knowledge to work, I was still anxious, but thankfully, Anne and I made our firsts sets together, which took the edge off some of the fear. The outcome was stunning even though I was new at it. During a year of practice I have made about ten sets, learned so much, and tweaked my methods!

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     I’m not a professional, by any means, but the hardcovers are beautiful and I thought some people might like to buy some of my limited-edition hand-bound books. I promise you the content of the books is amazing even if I am a novice at binding. You can watch just how much I struggle and how long it takes me to make a 4-book set on my YouTube channel, called Healing Bound Books. There, you can even give me tips in the comments or maybe watch your own set be bound. Each set is bound by hand on the days when my health is cooperating, so each set can take upwards of two weeks.