I don’t think The Gift is really about an immortal woman. It’s about being human and the elusive nature of consent.

I thought I was writing supernatural fiction, and the book is that. The Gift is a gothic romance tale that forces the reader to jump across time to follow separate story lines as the characters live their stories and eventually intersect with each other around a common moment. It isn’t neat. Isn’t meant to be. Neither is my life.

I am a drug addict, twenty-seven years into recovery. That journey came through fifteen years of ordained ministry until addiction and the church’s administrative powers led me out the back door, quietly. I dragged the wreckage of my life into recovery and eventually spent the next two decades building a life. I slowly found an amazing version myself and along the way I learned some truths about being human.

We are messy creatures. Each of us carries our own particular baggage of trauma, shame, guilt and lack. We are all wearing the deceitful faces of our own fears. We are wounded. We lie. We do incredible things in our attempt to mark ourselves as worthy of love, of acceptance—as enough.

And somewhere in all of that mess is the question I was unconsciously asking: When are our choices really our own? How much of what we call choice is grief, fear, need, history, addiction, love—or simply someone else’s will pressing against ours?

So, when the characters stepped out of my imagination and into this realm of paper and fantasy, it is no wonder that they carried forms of the very humanity that I have come to know in myself and others.

Cam is gripped by grief and anxiety while his life makes choices for him. Kelly is compulsive and impossibly codependent, her choices repeating the same cycles. Sam carries father issues through everything, albeit with gravity. And Angela, glorious and incredible Angela, is driven by her immortal brokenness to make immoral and understandable choices—for other people.

The Gift is a novel about our humanity. Mine. Yours, perhaps.

And I never planned on writing that book.

(and, there’s a dog) 😏