Sun Kissed & Salted follows Alika Jones through trauma, reckless love, addiction, spiritual searching, and survival as she slowly learns that coming home to herself may be the hardest journey of all. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Much of the story is drawn from my personal experience, told through the lens of a fictional character who represents anyone so lost that searching for the essence of self in all the wrong places leads down a path of self-destruction. Alika finds that, with complete honesty and accountability for her actions, she attains the freedom and peace she had always wanted by traveling with reckless abandon within herself through self-love and a spiritual awakening.

The novel explores how Alika sometimes mistakes danger, intensity, or escape for love. What did you most want readers to understand about that pattern?

Life can be a messy road when a person has suffered childhood trauma and is wounded over and over again by the choices they make and the toxic relationships they think they deserve, yet with a tenacious spirit, this cycle can be transformed into an upward climb to peace and freedom from self-inflicted suffering. 

Memory plays a big role in the book, often moving in circles rather than in a straight line. How did you approach shaping the novel’s structure?

I started in chronological order but found it quite boring. I dug deeper into the writing process and discovered that the story’s circular motion mirrored the downward spiral Alika was sliding into. I felt it was a more honest portrayal of the phases of a life’s journey, which is rarely a straight line.

By the end of the novel, what do you hope readers take away about survival, self-worth, and the process of coming back to oneself?

I hope readers absorb the importance of never giving up on someone they may know, or perhaps themselves, who is living in cycles of self-destruction. I think miracles do happen more often than we think. The quiet extraordinary events that inspire wonder and astonishment, defying normal standards, are what I call miracles and are characterized by the transformative stories of people who seem too far gone to help. I say, “Hold on to the hope that miracles do happen and can occur in your life or in the lives of those you love. It takes total honesty, humility, willingness to change, forgiveness, accountability, and acceptance, but it is possible to find the true freedom we search for, with peace of mind followed by self-love and ultimately love of all there is.”

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