How My Writing Journey Began

It was not until 2009 when I was in my very early thirties that I decided to start writing again. I was bored beyond belief with my life and with my employment and I felt that my life did not mean anything. I could drop down dead tomorrow, and it would be as if Andrew Brookman never even existed. I had no friends, and I was a complete Joke in my world of work, just the cleaner who was constantly told off for doing shabby work. I even felt as if I was ignored by my own family but then that boat had sailed a long time ago. I felt like a ghost that nobody could see apart from me. 

I needed to do something with my life, and I needed to mean something to people and for that matter, I needed to mean something to myself. I needed to leave myself a legacy that would be based on my own life and how I felt about my own life. I wanted to write about the life of a closeted Homosexual and what people like me go through living a repressed and fearful and Isolated life. I had lived this life, and I had survived all this repression and now I needed to write it all down to help other people and hopefully help myself in the process. 

I had my dreams of romance and of one day being in love and of calling somebody my partner just like my three siblings had done. I knew I would never have any children. It would never be a reality for me, so the next best thing was creativity. If I could not fill my life with children, then creativity was the next best thing. My very first book was a novella about an openly gay man and a closeted Gay man and how they coped with living like this it was infused with erotica, and it is probably my favourite book because it was my first published book. It was published in 2011, and I am still very proud of the book fourteen years later. I am of course the Closeted Gay Man in the book. I will not apologize for the graphic sex in the book because I was sexually repressed. I needed an Outlet. 

I did all of this on a very old dusty laptop that I kept in the bottom of my grandparents’ wardrobe. One day I just recovered it from the old wardrobe and made a small space for myself in the corner of my bedroom in their house and I wrote this novella in any spare time that I had. I wrote it in secret Obviously and I also wrote in secret in my dad’s house with my little Notebook computer. It was very difficult writing a book in secret, but I did it and not a single soul knew about it. I loved writing this book in secret and even when my novella came in the post it went through my dad’s hands and then into mine. My dad would have gone berserk if he knew what was under that packaging. 

In 2012 I managed to get my own little house, and it was my space to write. In my little kitchen every evening I would write, and it would fill me with Joy. I just wrote and wrote and used my Imagination as best I could. None of my writing was getting anywhere and I was getting royalty cheques, but it was just a few pounds. I spent my own money to publish my books because they were very important to me, and I wanted to showcase them. I would publish one book a year constantly hoping that one of them would be my breakthrough. In 2025 through utter persistent and constant searching, I found myself an agent. It took me fourteen years, but I found one and here we are finally trying to see myself as a serious author. If my story can tell you anything it’s to never give up on your dreams but to just be persistent and when you get knocked down as you will over and over just bounce back up and keep being creative.