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 Tube iframe>
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.” You can imagine how pumped I was about that!
Can anyone tell me about a disabled hero they’ve loved? I’ll kick off with Christian in Laura Kinsale’s Flowers From The Storm. He’s a man who’s had a stroke but he is the most divine hero. I inhaled that book!
The last two years however, my Mother’s Day has been taken out of my control due to my eldest son having to play jazz at a concert. But what’s not to like? I get to sit down, enjoy a lovely lunch, chat to people and listen to lovely music. Win-win, really.
My medical romance, 
It’s April 25th today and in Australia and New Zealand that means Anzac Day. For those of you reading this who are not from either of these countries, it is a day when we remember the men and women who have served in the defense of our countries. A bit like Memorial Day in the US, although Anzac Day came into being because of a specific battle in Turkey on April 25th 1915. The day Australia lost it’s innocence and came of age. 8,700 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders died during the Gallipoli campaign along with many British, French and Indian and Turkish soldiers. With a small population, the deaths of young man during WW1 changed the lives of an entire generation.
