Ann Thompson
About Me and My Book: Voluntary Force
I graduated from UCLA with a degree in English and went on to serve a six-year stint as an officer in the United States Army in the mid-1970’s. Thirty years ago, I finally had the opportunity to do some creative writing, drafting my first novel, Voluntary Force, inspired by my own long silence about my military experiences.
Voluntary Force is a novel about a woman's fight for acceptance at a time when the military gave women no respect. The character-driven story focuses on a conflicted woman as she copes with her own transformation to Army officer and with the demands of a military in the throes of transition. Her external conflict to compete with men on macho-male turf drives a greater internal conflict within herself to overcome her feelings of endless exclusion. The military allows her to compete with men only because of her sex and draws her into a professional and personal trap.
Voluntary Force is a character-driven story that can give millions of military women, yesterday's and today's, their own fictional heroine. Voluntary Force allows readers who like a good story and can appreciate life's dilemmas, to see what the sexual revolution of the seventies was all about and its effect on military history. Voluntary Force was written for the thousands of ordinary military women whose struggle for acceptance in the military qualifies as a unique American experience.
I finished writing the novel Voluntary Force in 1995! I spent a couple of years searching for a literary agent/publisher, but my many query letters received only rejection letters. In 1999, I decided to self-publish the book. Over the many years since 1995, I have spent some time and money promoting this novel, but with zero results. I stopped my promotion efforts of this novel in 2002, my dream of writing a great American novel did not happen, so my ego was hurt for a while, especially difficult for me was the acceptance of my reality that my creative writing abilities could not even pay for my monthly utility bills. So, I continued with my writing career as a technical writer, went on to earn a good middle-class living writing technical manuals for the aerospace industry for 30 years.
I fully retired from my technical writer’s career 10 years ago, hoping never to look at a computer screen for 10 hours a day again like I had for my previous 30 years of writing and researching mind-numbing facts, my brain always engrossed 24-hours every day, all in pursuit for technical accuracy in my engineering writing.
Today, I live in Arizona, about 100 miles east of Tucson, on a remote property, at the edge of the universe, where the sun, sand, and serenity seem endless. I love the outdoors, enjoy excellent health, and still love the challenge of climbing up a rock.
I hope you enjoy reading my novel Voluntary Force.
Sincerely,
Ann Thompson
Author, Voluntary Force
