One of the fun things about being a writer is all the research. Wait! Come back! We’re serious. The classic advice is to write what you know, but even if you knew some really cool and exciting things, you’d have to reuse them over and over and they would cease to seem so cool and exciting.

Kent and Jen want their characters to be well-rounded people with varied interests, and they want them to be distinct from one another. While we do draw some from our own lives, neither of us is a villain, and we’ve found that our novels work better when there’s some conflict. We’re also not scientists, or rock stars, or psychically gifted. When our characters are, it requires some reading on our parts to make it all feel real.

We also don’t want to set all of our novels in our boring little home town. Even when we invent a new setting, it still draws heavily on the real world. We like to visit sites we’re writing about, but that’s not always possible. So again, we hit the books. And the internet.

To give you a taste of Sibling of Music Novel, here are a few of the things we’ve been researching lately:

• the ingredients list of Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts
• the immersive sensory details of eating said Pop-Tarts
• the Burmese alphabet
• old Agfa cameras
• sesame allergy symptoms
• how quickly a pot seed can reach maturity
• postmodernist painters
• home computers of the 1980s
• the lunar cycle in 2008
• the original floor numbering of the Empire State Building
• old dentist chairs
• the salinity of the Hudson river
• audition monologs

Now that we’ve spilled so many details, you have to promise that you’re not going to write the novel faster than we do!