Cozying Up To... Jim and Joyce Lavene - Part 2

Today we continue our three part interview with Jim and Joyce Lavene.

Donna - You live and work in North Carolina; how does where you live affect your writing? Did it influence writing a stock car series, for example? Do you set all your books close to home?

J&J - North Carolina is a weird state. We mean that in a good way! It has rivers that flow backwards, fairy crosses, strange phenomena like the Brown Mountain lights and a love of history. It’s a good place to live and work. It probably didn’t influence NASCAR because that sport has grown to almost every corner of the earth. We do set many of our books at least close to home (Wilmington, Myrtle Beach, Duck are places we like to go) probably because you can find a little of everything here. We’re two hours from the mountains and two hours from the coast. Like California without all the mansions!

Donna – I’m intrigued by your note on the Midnight Ink site that your pets ‘help’ you write. How?

J&J - Quincy won’t let us write unless he’s in the office too. He howls if we don’t let him in and hogs up all the space when we do! We had to have a bigger desk to accommodate him since he has to lay in front of the monitor. He has this uncanny ability to sneak up and lay his paw on the zzz key. We’ve come to acknowledge that it means we’re writing boring stuff and look to see what we can do different.

Donna – You are very prolific as a team; what is your schedule like: writing, family, down time, etc?

J&J - We write six days a week, half chapter per day. We usually do at least one set of revisions (for another book) during the rough draft part of each book. The rest of our writing time is taken up with promotional things; website, blogging, setting up promotional events for ourselves and the Carolina Conspiracy, our group of mystery authors that we promote with.

We are fortunate to have our whole family living close by and see them almost every day. Sometimes that takes up even more time when our son, the pizzeria owner, needs a spare pizza delivery guy or our daughter, the bookstore owner, needs some help with something. But we love being part of their lives.

As far as downtime, we like to drive around the back roads looking for anything unusual. We love taking pictures too! Jim likes to putter with his (and other people’s computers) and Joyce likes to do some watercolor painting. We even manage to sneak in some TV occasionally and enjoy movies and reading.

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That’s all for now… but come back Friday for the final installment - as well as contact information and lots more - of Cozying Up To… Jim and Joyce Lavene.