Q:
How long have you been writing fiction?A: Since I was a little girl and started pecking out stories on my parents' old manual typewriter. I think I was 6 years old then.
Q: What was your first published story?
A: I sold a short story called "Red Moments" to a religious magazine when I was 15. I got paid for it, but unfortunately the magazine folded before the story actually was printed. They let me keep the money.
Q:
What inspired you to write the Annette Vetter adventure
series for teens?
A: I loved Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden and couldn't get enough of that kind of reading when I was young. My friends and I used to play detective when we were teeny boppers, which inspired my novel, The Root Cellar Mystery (still unscheduled for publication). Annette was a girl I admired because she got to live in the country and she had a lot of solitude. I grew up in a family with six kids, so there wasn't a lot of privacy, and anyone who knows me understands that I value my solitude.
Q: How did you come up with the plot for Intimate Abduction in your Space Trilogy?
A: I was taking a supernatural literature course at Michigan State my senior year (1975) and we were assigned to write a short story on the supernatural. I had a dream one morning, where I woke up and was hearing people speaking in a different language outside my apartment in married housing. That's when I got the idea to write about a woman who suddenly can't understand what anybody is saying to her because they are speaking in a "different" language. That short story eventually turned into the plot for the conspiracy in which Johanna found herself in an altered state, abducted by ETs... but not knowing exactly what was happening to her at the time. When I became interested in UFOs and research in 1984, I incorporated a lot of my new thoughts into developing the sci-fi novel, adding a spark of romance.
Q:
What is the story behind
Night of the November Moon?
A: I started writing the novel when I was in my early 20s, in Michigan. It was called "The Ghost of Pelton Manor" at the time. It was about a young woman who worked for a newspaper and whose husband was killed in an auto accident. She began dating a schoolteacher, but she was still obsessed over her high school crush, and when she chanced to meet up with him again, she jumped at the chance to rekindle what was there. Strangely enough, a lot of aspects to that novel eventually happened to me in real life!
Q: Throughout All Time, your
memoir, reveals an amazing amount of personal information about
you... and the people in your life at the time. How could you
expose all of that so publicly?
A: The memoir I wrote about my life with my second husband was a therapeutic tool. I actually began the book in the early '90s, when memories were fresh in my mind. I never told Ethan I was writing, or planning to publish, the book because I was afraid he would make me promise not to make it public. But I felt I had to share those deepest feelings because they were so profound, and I wanted others to know what it was like to find your soul mate (or twin flame, if that is what he was). I wanted others to know the pain as well as the joy of such a relationship, because it is rare, and by no means "perfect." A lot of people who have read the book have discovered things about me and they come up to me afterwards and talk as though they know me really well. I took great pains to "tone down" my opinions and to keep the people involved with my life from being hurt by what I had to say. I don't think I will attempt a book like this in the future. Those closest to me should have no reservations that I will expose them... I won't do that to them.
Q:
Are there more Annette Vetter books in the works?
A: Yes, The Legend of the Lantern has been started, but I don't know when I'll get around to finishing it. I also have one more after that planned.
Q:
What other novels are in the works?
A: I plan to get Sonata Summer published, which is my romantic suspense novel about Aspen that I wrote in the early 1980s. Again I have the theme centered around death, where the heroine has lost her fiance. This theme keeps recurring, such as in Rainbow Majesty, my light worker novel inspired by Electric Mountain Lodge and Paonia, Colo., which I hope to get out in 2010.
Q:
What genre is your favorite?
A: Romantic suspense and mystery. My science fiction is not true sci fi, it's more new age. I like to get into my characters and what they are feeling. I am happiest when I am in the midst of writing a novel, so I hope I will be able to get back into doing just that... and soon.
Contact Ann Ulrich Miller at annmiller@centurytel.net