My agent is the fantastic Catherine Drayton of InkWell Management. Who is she and how did you win her heart? If the author thinks it’s great, it must be fan-freaking-tab-ulous! Plus, how awesome is that title–ARISE!? Now, tell us about your agent. GASP! Oh my gosh, Tara, now you’ve got me drooling for ARISE. And you know what? The spontaneity worked, because I think ARISE blows HEREAFTER out of the water! But with ARISE, the second book in the Hereafter Trilogy, I totally pants-ed it. I wrote the entire original manuscript based off of an outline, that set out a chapter-by-chapter sequence of events. I was a plotter, especially for HEREAFTER. And I gotta say, you pull of the cemetery-creep-factor really well! When you set out to actually write it, were you a plotter or pantster? Wow! That’s…impressive–I love that it’s been an idea boiling in your mind for so long.

That early story haunted me, and almost ten years later, it grew into HEREAFTER. I always had a fascination with old cemeteries (their history, their eerie sense of watchfulness), so I wrote a story about the type of person who might wake up in one. But my inspiring moment, or event, happened in 2000, when I drew “first straw” to present a short story in my college Fiction Writing Workshop. I actually remember the exact date I started writing HEREAFTER – Ap– because I still have the email that I sent my best girlfriends, asking them to read the first chapter. So, Tara, when did you first start writing HEREAFTER? Was there any sort of inspiring moment behind it (like dreams of sparkly vampires-ha!)? Tara currently lives in Oklahoma with her husband, son, and a menagerie of ill-behaved pets. Luckily, she soon remembered how much she loved telling ghost stories, particularly to her girlfriends who liked visiting abandoned cemeteries as much as she did. Well, I am now absolutely ecstatic to share my recent interview with her!īorn and raised in Oklahoma, Tara Hudson graduated with a degree in law, mostly because she believed all the horror stories about English majors and their careers in the food-service industry. You all may recall my gushing recommendation of Tara Hudson’s Hereafter a few weeks back.

Elegy tara hudson