Hi there! My name is Brooke Martin and I want to be an author!

I’ve loved reading since I was a child. There’re so many images etched in my mind of reading – hot summer days lounging all over my bed reading page after page, or sitting in my little cushioned reading corner to read The Chronicles of Narnia, or my Dad bursting into my room when I was in Year 7, asking what had happened after I cried “he’s a idiot!” while reading The Lord of the Rings.

I also remember sitting in my swivel chair in primary school, busy at work tapping out my first attempt at writing a story – all about a girl transported into a fairyland, by falling through a secret portal hidden within a massive tyre lying in an abandoned junkyard.

For years writing was always something I wanted to do. I came up with ideas and the start of tales, but never quite was able to stick with them and figure out how it ended. But in high school I came across the author C. S. Lakin, whose website can be found here. By reading her blog and her book The Twelve Key Pillars of Novel Construction, suddenly I had an excellent framework upon which to build my story, and by the time I graduated uni, I had my full first draft of my new adult steampunk-fantasy novel.

Since then it’s been five years. I’ve edited it myself a couple of times, but for the most part it’s sat in the proverbial desk drawer. In the meantime I’ve moved cities twice, changed jobs, faced covid, and got married.

But I’ve always hoped to have it published. There’s something about opening a book, being drawn in, and becoming utterly captivated with the tale and the characters and the world, losing yourself in a world of ink and imagination. The emotion, the adventure, the bittersweet moment of reaching the end, knowing it is over, yet the story touching your heart even as you close the cover and feel the ache of it within you. I hope my writing would be worthy of such a response from others.

So here I am. Finally ready to start the process of getting this manuscript professionally edited, and, one day, published! It’s exciting, and scary, and full of unknowns and potential. Publishing can be a scary and uncertain road, so I thought I’d share my story here. I figure, if this little record can help anyone else on their publishing journey, then it will be well worth it.

So stay tuned! Next time I plan to share how I’ve decided to go about publishing, and why.

For now, let me know, are you a reader? Writer? If so, do you dream to be published one day?