Content
USC student achieves lifelong writing dream
A University of the Sunshine Coast student has sacrificed weekend parties and school holidays to achieve his lifelong dream of writing and publishing his own book.
Journalism student Greg Peake, 19, of Burpengary was a 16-year old high school student at St Columban’s College, Caboolture, when he began writing “The Dormant Powers”.
The novel follows the adventures of teenager Jack Sanderson who manages to unblock the mental barriers inside his mind to gain the power of telekinesis. In doing so, he discovers an opponent with supernatural powers, whose destructive behaviour he tries to stop.
Greg said writing the novel had allowed him to indulge his childhood interest in the supernatural world, which he still thinks is “pretty cool”.
“As a child, my imagination would run wild and I used to spend a lot of time thinking about super powers,” he said.
“When I came up with the idea for the book, I thought I’d better get that down on paper.
“I played around with the idea of how humans only use one-tenth of their brain, and how we could achieve supernatural powers and telekinesis if we put the unused sections of our brain into action.”
Greg said he sought a publisher from the internet, and got dozens of knockbacks before Poseidon Books agreed to publish his manuscript.
“I had to find a publisher who would accept unsolicited manuscripts because I didn’t have a literary agent,” he said.
Greg is currently working on a sequel to “The Dormant Powers” and hopes to one day be a journalist with a string of successful novels to his name.
— Michelle Widdicombe