Junior Jordan Martinez is from Jacksonville, Ore. and loves to write.  She has a natural gift for putting many different ideas onto paper and creating thorough, detailed stories with intricate plots and characters.  Influenced by writers such as Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkein, Chuck Palahniuk, and J.K. Rowling, Martinez has a tangible passion for writing, and hopes to gain fame slowly through the notoriety of her original works.

Martinez began professionally and actively writing during her junior year of high school. She remarked that she doesn’t know how she decided to begin writing, but is absolutely certain that music she was listening to at the time influenced and inspired her to write. Martinez found that writing gave her a creative release from the stresses of life and issues that were going on within her life.

“Writing can give people a chance to be creative and get their inner thoughts out in a healthy way,” Martinez commented.

Martinez realized that she was good at writing after she let some of her friends read her pieces.

“After I wrote a story, I let my friends read them.  I realized that writing is something that I seriously wanted to pursue when I started to post stories on fictionpress.com.  It’s a place I like to share my work,” Martinez said.

Martinez says that she has been greatly influenced by her family and friends.  She names her father as one person who has been a major influence on her becoming a writer.

Martinez enjoys many different types of writings, but clearly enjoys writing in the fiction genre.  When she began writing initially, most of the stories that she wrote were in the horror genre, and she continues to pursue perfection in this genre.

Martinez said that her favorite part about writing is the infinite creativity and possibility that comes along with it.

“In writing, you can create any story, anything really, out of nothing. Writing is one of the greatest platforms to represent current issues in society.  In the end though, I really, really just love stories, and story telling. I always have. Growing up, I watched a lot of movies and have always been inspired in some way by what I saw,” Martinez said.

Like many writers who are inspired by external forces, music and movies have had a big impact on her passion for writing.

“My second biggest influences go hand in hand, Jack White and My Chemical Romance.  These are two of my favorite musical artists who love stories and can tell them creatively and beautifully.  I’m also influenced by a number of filmmakers, like Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, and Stanley Kubrick,” Martinez commented.

Martinez has already written a number of short novels, and last year she wrote and self-published her first novel through Amazon.  The book is called The Great Scheme of Things and is published under the pseudonym J.M. Black.  The novel took her about two months to write, and then a few months to publish.

“The hardest part about self-publishing is that you have to market the book by yourself, which is something I’m still trying to figure out,” Martinez said.

She continues to describe the feeling of writing and self-publishing The Great Scheme of Things as “surreal.”

Jordan also plans to self-publish her second novel, Ou Topos, under the same pseudonym.  She says that she is very close to finishing this novel, and is naturally excited to get it out to her readers. Martinez described her new novel as very different from her.

“This book deals with very difficult issues.  It focuses on an impoverished family living through the Dust Bowl in 1935,” Martinez previewed.

The main character in this story is a father, who hates his life but cannot escape it, and until he finds a perfect representation of his life in reality, and has to make the decision between the family he hates, or the perfect family he’s found in his utopia.

Martinez hopes that this story will challenge reader’s imagination.

Martinez, along with one of her best friends from back home, Micah McCaw, have written a book, which they plan on publishing in the near future.

She has her own website that anyone can visit to stay up to date on her writing, what she’s working on, or her upcoming novel.

Her main website can be accessed here. Martinez has also written 50 original stories which readers can view here.