Tara Goedjen's "The Breathless"

Tara Goedjen adores fairytales, mysteries, and ghost stories.

She wrote her first story at age eleven about children who disappeared at midnight, and she’s been writing ever since. Mostly raised in Alabama, she played college tennis in Iowa and then moved to Alaska and Australia before heading back to the continental US.

While completing grad school, Goedjen worked as a tennis coach, a yoga instructor, a university writing teacher, and as an editor for a publishing house. These days, when she’s not making up stories, she's probably going for a hike, staring at a to-do list, reading a novel, or eating all of California’s seasonal fruit.

Here Goedjen dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, The Breathless:

The two leads would be easy. If I could have my dream cast, I’d want sixteen-year-old Mae Cole to be played by Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things. Besides being a fan of the show, I love how Millie plays Eleven, who starts off the series as a quiet, mysterious, gifted, and troubled girl: all qualities that embody Mae in The Breathless.

I’d also want Cage Shaw, my other main character, to be played by Nick Robinson, who I adored in the movie adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s Everything Everything (he also appeared in The Kings of Summer and Jurassic World, a movie I had to see out of nostalgia for Jurassic Park). In Everything Everything, Nick plays a character who’s in love with the girl next door, and completely devoted to her, but who’s also trying to protect his family, in the same way that Cage Shaw is in love with Mae’s sister, Roxanne Cole, and trying to do the best he can by both her and his family—especially after things go terribly wrong.

Visit Tara Goedjen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue