Don’t you just love that cover? I’m delighted to welcome Australian author Joanne Nicholson to Being Anne today. Her latest book, In Another Life, looks quite fascinating…here’s Joanne to tell us more.
I have a sister who is a psychic – she literally works doing psychic readings for people and I must admit from what I have heard she is spookily accurate. Most people think this would be a great perk for me, however she is unable to ‘see’ anything for someone who is a blood relative.
Just for the record I have no spiritual abilities and whilst I don’t understand that world, I know that there is definitely something to it. My sister has been able to tell me things about friends of mine that she has never met; information that she wouldn’t be privy to; information that I didn’t even know about them but that they had confirmed after the reading.
I sit on the scale of spiritual discovery somewhere between not understanding this phenomenon and finding it intriguing.
Talking with a friend on this topic led to us discussing past life regressions. I’ve never done one (to be honest I’m a bit scared to), but I find it fascinating. I’d like to think we get multiple chances to live life.
I was lying in bed one night wide-awake, the time that all my best ideas run errantly through my mind and wondered what would happen if you did a past life regression and found that someone from your past life was still alive. Would it be unethical to contact them? Would you have a connection? How would you even prove that you knew them in a past life? This internal monologue of mine turned into the concept for my book In Another Life.
In my book, the main character Lily is searching for a connection to her deceased mother and so she does a past life regression to see if they were related in a previous life. She instead discovers that she has a soul connection with her father. She is shocked to find she was a male in her last life, her father was her brother and that they had a little sister. After the regression, Lily searches to find out information to verify what she saw and learns that the property in Bathurst, where they lived in the early 1900s, is still there.
On a visit to the property Lily learns that her little sister from her past life, Elizabeth, is an elderly lady who lives in a local nursing home. Lily finds the temptation to contact her sister too great and arranges to meet with her to see whether they have a soul connection under the guise of completing a university assignment. They have an easy rapport that leaves Lily wondering whether she should disclose her true reason for meeting and if she does, how she can prove her claims of a past life.
The book was a challenge to weave a fictional story that incorporated spiritual elements I don’t practice with historical information.
Prior to publishing In Another Life on Amazon Kindle last year I struggled to find an image for the cover of the book that would capture the country with an image that portrayed current day and Lily’s previous life. In the story there is a common thread of both Lily and her previous self, William, making boats out of leaves and floating them down a river. I set my fourteen year old daughter a task to build a boat out of sticks and leaves, then photograph it with her SLR camera. I was thrilled with the resulting image and went on to use that for the cover of the book.
If I have piqued your interest in reading In Another Life it is available to purchase now for kindle from Amazon in the UK and US.
Thank you Joanne – wishing you every success!
About the author
Joanne Nicholson is an Australian author who juggles parenting four kids with trying to exercise, socialise, manage sporting teams, complete mundane chores and write. She loves boating, reading, pilates, listening and playing music, playing basketball and spending quality time with family and friends. She has published two women’s fiction novels, Intuition and In Another Life; a YA novel Music Score and short stories, Horrorscopes and Spirits. All of these titles are available on Amazon Kindle. Joanne is currently working on her next novel Positive which is due to be published later this year.