Interviews:
Cancelled
Vows
By Lauren Carr
Book Tour Interview One - Writing Ritual
1)
Do you
write every day?
Yes, I do. I
always manage to squeeze in at least a couple of hours to work on a book. If I
don’t have time to write during the actual day, I will write in the evening,
after getting everything else that needs completed done.
2)
What is
writing schedule?
My dogs get me up at six o’clock in the morning. After
a half hour of feeding them and brewing coffee, then I’ll sit in bed with my
husband, drinking coffee and “take care of business.” It’s not as naughty as it
sounds. We go over my sales figures, etc.
Then, I will move onto social media. But I’m not
playing on social media. I’ll spend a couple of hours retweeting posts from
members in my retweet groups, checking out new followers, answering e-mails.
It is usually about eleven o’clock before I can sit
down to start writing.
3)
Not only
are you a best-selling author, but you are also a wife, mother to a teenager,
and you have four dogs. Wow. How do you balance your time?
I don’t. If I didn’t have my husband, nothing would
get done. He does the errands and grocery shopping, so that I am able to stay
home. The important thing is keeping on
a schedule and planning out what deadlines have to be met. I’ll admit that half
the time I don’t meet a deadline, but the important ones—like interviews—I do
meet.
4)
Where do
you write?
I have a writer’s studio on the top floor of my home. It is my space. No one is allowed in it
because in my studio—I am completely me—the good-the bad—the messy.
Translation: When I write, I only write. That means I
don’t pay attention to dust on my desk or the ringing of the phone. My husband
is a former navy officer who sees every speck of dust. So he’s not allowed to
enter my studio—because then he would have a stroke and I’d have no one to go
out to get food.
5)
Is there a
specific ritualistic thing you do during your writing time?
I wouldn’t call it ritualistic, but I do have a
tendency to get lost in my book when writing. I mean I can even lose sense of
time.
The other day I was working away on my next Lovers in
Crime Mystery, Killer in the Band. I
lead a book club at our church. Suddenly, I saw that the time was 6:35 pm. The
meeting at the church started at 7 pm. I wasn’t dressed. I hadn’t thawed
anything for dinner. The dogs weren’t fed.
I made the meeting. Luckily, the members never
realized I was in my pajamas under that coat. If they did, they didn’t say
anything. My family ate dry take-out chicken for dinner.
6)
In today’s
tech savvy world, most writers use a computer or laptop. Have you ever written
parts of your book on paper?
Back in the nineties, before laptops, I would write
outlines for my books on yellow notepaper. Rarely would I refer to them. The
writing of the outline helped me to sort out the plot in my own mind.
Actually, you would be surprised by how many writers
do write in longhand. I once took at survey of the students in a writing class
I taught. Half of the students write in long-hand. I have a niece who wants to
be a writer. She’s in her twenties and she writes in long-hand.
Me—my handwriting is so bad no one would be able to
read it if I wrote in longhand.
7)
What project are you working on now?
Right now I’m working on Killer in
the Band, the Lovers in Crime mystery coming out at the end of April,
readers will get to know more about Joshua Thornton Jr (J.J.), Murphy’s identical
twin brother. J.J. has graduated at the top of his class from law school and is
returning home to spend the summer studying for the bar exam. However, to the
Thornton’s shock and dismay, J.J. decides to move in with Suellen Russell, a
lovely widow twice his age. The move brings long buried tensions between the
father and son to the surface. When a brutal killer strikes, the father and son
must set all differences aside to solve the crime before J.J. ends up in the
crosshairs of a murderer.
