Tara Lynn Thompson

Life is a great story, one that requires verbs, adjectives, and a few made-up words just to keep people guessing. I get a sharp, devious zing when I'm keeping people guessing. From early on, during my way, way, way back days as a 19-year-old beat reporter, I’ve been confounding people with my descriptive writing. At first, I thought the confounding was a compliment. Mostly, I think they were annoyed. “I don’t appreciate needing a dictionary when I sit down to read my paper, young lady,” one reader once complained, which only made me feel exuberant (adj., means “intensely happy”). It wasn’t that I had an abnormally, or even that impressive, vocabulary. I just loved mixing words into a heap of puzzle pieces and seeing who wanted to dive in and find the corner. My early beginnings in print taught me many things, two of which I’ll point out now: 1) People are fascinating. 2) Writing rules are for the timid. For over a decade, I honed my interviewing skills until I had developed a canny, if not at times creepy, way of reading people. Or at least observing them. Their personalities, quirks, oddities, passions, language, all of it I recorded in my head like an unhackable Cloud. One day I knew it would all come rushing back out again. One day. Throughout my career, as I migrated into the neatly stacked boxes of business communication, the unquenchable thirst of marketing strategy, and the tight squeeze of advertising writing, I never lost my love of the character. Of their story. And of their gripping adventure, if I could ever toss them into that heap of puzzle pieces. This is my one day. The Another Series, for me, is an adventure of love, honor, and danger, if it happened to the quirkiest girl in the neighborhood. She’s our heroine. And the culmination of what fear, doubt, and hesitation does to our life when we give it value. Or even a breath to speak. She will, however, prove to us she’s an overcomer. But, first, she’s got to prove it to herself.