Janet Miller has long been a writer, but she was first a reader.

Janet loved to read and kept finding new books in her bookcase, like Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, all of which she’s read many times. She also read most, if not all, of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift mysteries.

She lived in the suburbs of New York City until she moved with her family to Denver, Colorado. Leaving friends was, of course, a major upset, but she learned quite a bit from this move. New York City, with the largest city population of the U.S. and a cultural, business, and entertainment center, was a far cry from Denver, whose history revolved around silver mining. After four years, they moved again, this time to the California Bay Area.

In addition to reading, she liked to know how things worked. While in sixth grade, she constructed a 6-foot parachute jump with her brother’s Erector set. Building it was fun. (Taking it apart was not.)

Throughout her school years, Janet wasn’t much of a writer. Science held her interest. What is the world made of? What keeps living things alive? How do telephones work?

These interests led her to study biochemistry and work as a biochemist for four years and then, intrigued by the laboratory equipment she used, she became a computer programmer. While in school, she met her husband Doug, with whom she landed in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, in California, where they raised their two sons.

She is presently rewriting her puzzling middle-grade novel and has completed a middle-grade informational fiction graphic novel, The Atoms That Built the Universe: As Told by One That Was There, which follows a friendly and adventurous hydrogen atom (named Flighty Hydrogen) from its creation to its current home, a French fry on a student’s lunch tray in the school cafeteria.