Author Interview – Caroline Miller

  

What’s your story? How did you get into writing?

Bio for Wikipedia give essence of my story

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_B._Miller

I got into writing by choice. I’ve always wanted to write. At this time in my life, I have the leisure and the means to do it. Call it a big item on my bucket list.

What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

Learn your craft. Expect rejection. In fact embrace it to learn.

What are you working on now?

The Necromancer of Zentralfriedhof follows a young prima ballerina on her first European tour dancing the lead role in Swan Lake. As she performs in the best theaters in Europe, she is haunted by her deceased ballet teacher and being hunted by a madman who see the dancer’s death as an escape to another world. Only the Necromancer promises to save her.

What has been the most challenging part of publishing or marketing your book?

Finding an audience. It’s a noisy world and finding a voice in it is daunting. It takes money. It takes time. It takes persistence.

What has been your favorite part?

Meeting readers. Writing my blog (http://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/blog/) about the writing world and interacting with readers there too.

Who are your favorite authors?

Henry James, Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann, Haruki Murakami and Martha Grimes

What gave you the idea for your current work?

I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate. The question of reality has always intrigued me. The link between the quantum world and its off-spring, reality, iis a puzzle. Things “seem” more than they “are.” My last two novels question what is real and what is false. They are not beach reads.

If you could be any character in the book, which one would you be?

I imagine every author delights in his or her characters, even the evil ones. Critics accused John Milton of falling in love with Satan in his long poem Paradise Lost. But I think of all my “children” as equals because they are equally flawed. None do I favor above the other so I have no desire to be any of them though they might be aspects of myself.

What other books have you written and/or are working on for the future?

I’ve published three novels: Heart Land is a fictional memoir of a boy growing up in rural Ohio between 1930-1940, at the end of the Depression and at the beginning of World War II, a time of social and historic importance which resonates in today’s war-torn world — though it is largely a humorous look back; Gothic Spring, is a Victorian gothic that exposes the mind of a young girl as it is decending into madness, leaving behind death and mayhem; Trompe l’Oeil (to trick the eye) is a philosophical suspense thriller set in the 1960’s during the French Algerian War. The heroine arrives in France to work at a chateau laced with underground tunnels and finds herself embroiled in a series of intrigues. What is true and what is false is the mystery.

What’s your favorite quote?

To thine own self be true

What’s your favorite supernatural creature?

My imagination

Trompe l’Oeil on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Trompe-lOeil-To-Fool-Eye/dp/1938282000/