Vickie L. Adams Interview Published on: 15, Feb 2023

I'm 71 years old. I hardly remember my childhood! LOL I remember asking a lot about our family genealogy. My great-grandmother was still alive, but I wasn't supposed to ask her a lot of questions.

I didn't live in TN long enough to know what it was like. We moved to Detroit when I was five. We moved to Monroe when I started the fifth grade. I liked Monroe well enough, but it was a small town.

My wife, Lisa. She knows how important it is to me. She often reads my writing and makes suggestions.

I wrote short stories in middle school and worked on the school newspaper and the Yearbook in high school. I didn't spend as much time writing fiction because I was busy. In college, I worked in the newspaper and in the PR office. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. So when I could attend college full-time, I studied journalism. It wasn't until I was in the last semester of my senior year I realized I no longer had the desire to work on a newspaper. I started writing short stories again after I graduated from college in 1980.

My English teachers encouraged me. They told me I was a good writer. I believed them.

Finding a publisher. I didn't think I could publish it on my own. I don't remember how I came across Wicked Publishing, but when I did, Dawn Carter was so encouraging. Wicked is a small publishing company with a handful of authors. For me, it was a foot in the door.

I lived in San Antonio from 1976 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1987. San Antonio was the first place I could visit a gay bar. I think I lived there for months. The bar in Out of the Shadows is loosely based on the San Antonio bar. In 1983, they assigned me to work in a Basic Military Training Squadron. I knew several MTIs who were lesbians. It just all fell together.

I think you need to keep things believable. There are many tropes, ‘age gap’, ‘workplace romance’, and the classic ‘ice queen.' The characters need to feel like people you know.

By making the characters believable. They need to be whole people with faults and talents.

The Lieutenant in the book is mostly me. I used personal life experiences. I never had to investigate anything, but I had to deal with problems relating to being a lesbian. Basic Military Training was not a great place for me.

An edge? I'm not sure my characters have an edge. I try to create plots outside the norm. When creating characters, I base them on people I know and create an amalgamate of traits. Sometimes, I go through magazines and shop for physical traits.

Marketing. Finding an audience for your book. There are so many books available, you need to make your book stand out. With 'Out of the Shadows', I spent a lot of money on ads and websites offering to advertise.

Not much has changed. I guess the change is that I invest my time in research, writing, and marketing. I'm retired so I have the time for it.

I believe romance is the most popular genre. I incorporate other genres such as mystery in the storyline. I consider Heartland to be a kind of southern gothic story. I would love to re-release Heartland to add back what they removed and to change the cover.

I'm working on a story that involves romance and time travel.

I joined AllAuthor last year as part of my marketing plan. I really love the Book Mock-ups.