Larissa Reinhart’s funny smart Southern mysteries introduce heroines who are sassy, strong and funny – and generally have an “ex” from some past disaster hanging around like “forbidden fruit.” Perhaps it’s not surprising then that when the award winning and Wall Street Journal best selling author started out, she thought she was writing romantic comedy.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Larissa talks about why she loves funny dialogue and redemption stories and why she's working on a paranormal series set in Japan  - when she gets a spare moment from her three mystery series.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Why journalism didn't work for her as a career

How living in Japan' has helped her writing

Her secret 'paranormal project.

The big part humor plays in her mysteries

The writers she admires most

Why her favorite characters are 'tough dudes wishing to redeem themselves'

Where to find Larissa Reinhart: 

Website: https://www.larissareinhart.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/larissareinhartwriter

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/larissareinhart/

Facebook Group: The Mystery Minions

What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny: But now, here’s  Larissa .  Hello there Larissa and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

Larissa: Thank you so much Jenny, it's great to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Larissa Reinhart - author

Jenny: Beginning at the beginning - was there a 'Once Upon A Time' moment when you decided you just had to write fiction - and if so what the catalyst?

Larissa: Well really as far back as I can remember, I've been creating stories mostly in my head. I can remember about the age of four writing lists of words that I knew, and in first grade I was putting together little books and then selling them in second grade to my neighbours. I've always been into this book business I guess! I won some awards for writing when I was younger, but then I never thought seriously about becoming a writer as a career. I worked from my local newspaper in high school, and I really hated interviewing people and calling them up.

I'm a little introverted, so that was really difficult for me. Thoughts of journalism that I'd been kind of toying with in high school disappeared with that, and I did take some creative writing courses in college but mostly I just focused on my major which was History and Art History. So I didn't really take it seriously.

But about seven or eight years ago, my family was living in Japan and I had been a teacher, but I was no longer teaching. My daughters were young, but they were in school for the first time all day. I've lived in Japan before, so I didn't need to take classes or anything like that.

I had this time that I'd never had before. I was reading maybe three or four books a week and enjoying that, but wanting to do more. Reading a popular series at the time, I was telling my husband how I would have written the fourth book differently because I wasn't satisfied with it. So he encouraged me  and said "why don't you get back into writing and just try?" So that's what I did! And spending those two years in Japan, I wrote one manuscript that I will probably not do anything with; it was kind of an experiment. And then the second manuscript I wrote was Portrait of A Dead Eye. I can't really remember, but I think I had it finished before we moved back to the US.

I came back with it, and showed it to a friend who was a writer and she encouraged me to look into different writing groups like Romance Writers of America,