Jennifer Crusie & Bob Mayer's "Agnes and the Hitman"

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Bob Mayer is the New York Times bestselling author of over 35 books, both fiction and non-fiction.

Two of his more recent books -- Don’t Look Down and Agnes and the Hitman -- were written with Jennifer Crusie.

Here Mayer explains how he and Crusie use the movies to aid their collaboration:

When Jenny Crusie and I co-write, we start with two characters. The hero and the heroine. Because we're 600 miles apart we have to help each other with the characters. So we end up picking actors and actresses to be the templates for our characters so the other person can visualize them. And not just the name, but the role they were in, because that means a lot too. So for Don’t Look Down, Jenny picked Lucy Lawless to play Lucy Armstrong, her heroine. I used Kurt Russell in the movie Soldier. For Agnes and the Hitman, Jenny picked Selma Blair and I used George Clooney from the movie The Peacemaker.

Read an excerpt from Agnes and the Hitman and an excerpt from Don’t Look Down, and learn more about the books at Jenny Crusie's website and Bob Mayer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue