That was what I did growing up, and that apparently influenced me more than I knew.” “When I finished the book, I was like: I wrote about this girl who hangs out in a cemetery. “I spent my time in a church cemetery,” Verday says of her childhood. Verday’s mother worked as a church secretary in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “I wasn’t the type of person who said in elementary or high school that ‘I’m going to write a book,’” she says, although she did dabble in short stories about haunted houses and girl detectives. Stine when she was growing up, Verday did not anticipate being a professional writer. Once I started it was clear that this was the way the story was meant to come out.”Īlthough she loved reading everything from Newbery winners to R.L. “I got out the notebook and the pen, and it just flew from there.
I thought these characters clearly have a story to tell, so I started writing.”Īfter a bad start on the computer-she re-wrote the first chapter three times-Verday tried writing by hand. “I thought, I’m supposed to write this down-I never thought, this is weird, I’m hearing voices in my head. “Most people would think it was weird, but I loved ghost stories growing up, and to me it just seemed very natural,” she says. What if this girl liked to make perfumes? Could I set it in Sleepy Hollow? What if she hung out in cemeteries?” “As soon as I knew her name-and this is going to sound very odd, very strange-suddenly this flood of information came. When describing the experience to her husband, he guessed that the girl’s name might be “Abbey.” Verday knew that he was right. The line she said was intriguing and it got me very interested in her story.” All I could hear was the ‘b’ sound in the middle of the name. She said something, and I couldn’t hear her name clearly. “I was waiting to fall asleep in January of 2006, when all of a sudden I heard this girl speak. “This is going to sound like it was in a dream, but it wasn’t,” she explains during our interview at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville. The story of how Jessica Verday came to write The Hollow, the first in her paranormal teen trilogy-and her publishing debut-sounds like a scene from the novel in itself.
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