Hi, I’m Linda Jo Martin. I was born in Oakland in 1952, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area towns of El Cerrito and El Sobrante.

I love to read. I realized I had a problem back in first grade when my teacher couldn’t find any more Dick and Jane books I hadn’t already read. Graduating to biographies, I thrived on those and Nancy Drew while in elementary school. The first Newbery Medal winning novel I read, Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, left a lasting impression of what good writing can be.

In high school I kept a notebook for a variety of writing projects and in early adulthood, started to journal. I also carried on heavy correspondence with dozens of pen pals and remember many times they encouraged me by commenting on my writing skill and interesting letters.

I attended Shasta Community College in Redding, California, graduating with an AA degree in Early Childhood Education in 1977. I also attended College of the Sequoias in Visalia, California, graduating with an AS degree in Legal Assisting in 1991. More recently I’ve studied business and taken an Emergency Medical Technician - Basic (EMT-B) class through College of the Siskiyous in Yreka, California. Currently (as of May 2007) I work at the local pizza restaurant, doing anything and everything needed. I’m grateful to have this day-job after many years of being a stay-at-home-mom, homeschooler, and self-employed home business owner (web design and news).

For over twenty years while having and raising babies I made multiple unsuccessful attempts at writing novels. During this time I wrote quite a few short stories, poems, songs, memoirs, diatribes, legal documents, opinion editorials, and articles. One short story, Little Crocus, was published in Brilliant Star children’s magazine. Some of my articles were published in newspapers.

While homeschooling my two youngest children I read lots of middle grade and young adult novels out loud to them and fell in love with the genre. I also read and love historical fiction, mysteries, mainstream, literary, and classic novels. I read lots of non-fiction too.

In 2001 I completed two first-draft novels and made a resolution to write seven novel manuscripts before trying to market them. This was intended to be part of my training process - my novelist incubation period.

As of December 2004, those manuscripts were complete. They are:

The Scribe of Irohila
Escape
The Seagull Rebellion
The Alyssa Project
A Curious Woman Wants To Know
River Girl
Far Out… The Journey to Oblivion

Since then I’ve written The Legend of Kao Pao and The Valekan Migration, the third and fourth novels in my Antediluvian Adventure Series of middle grade and young adult novels.

My current goal is to revise these novels and submit them to publishers. Meanwhile I continue to write short stories and novels and to study every aspect of the fiction-writing craft.

Today I live in a cabin-like house in the middle of the Klamath National Forest in Northern California, twenty miles south of the Oregon border. I share this home with the youngest of my five children, a black dog named Bear, and three multi-colored cats.