Best-selling author Janet Evanovich on what it takes to actually write a book

Always doing the write thing

Need a Christmas gift?

Try NY Times best-selling mystery author Janet Evanovich’s “Dirty Thirty” or “The Recovery Agent.”

Evanovich: “To write a book takes six months or depends how bad you need the money. Just the writing — four months.”

“I only read cookbooks or I go to sleep at night with my own book in my head. I’m now old so ideas are everywhere — TV, movies, real life, sitting in bars. Writers are voyeurs. Nosy. We snoop, eavesdrop, look. Talking to someone, I’m watching their feet to see what shoes they’re wearing.”

“Writing was always important to me. The more I wrote the more I wanted to write. I loved it. I wanted to succeed badly. I craved worldwide success. Writing longhand my first book made a big $2,000. So excited, I went to some bargain store on Canal Street and bought my first real typewriter.”

The skinny on staying lean

I’m not zen enough to know what ZEN is — but before New Year’s jumps up, the movie colony’s jumped on it:

Hollywood’s long done fad diets, cleanses, detoxes — from the front, the back, some wacky, some tacky.

To get lean and mean on-screen as a Marine in “The Lucky One,” Zac Efron turned to ZEN — Zero Effort Nutrition.

A specialized food delivery company serving Southern California.

Devotees include Vanessa Hudgens, Paula Abdul, Kris Jenner, Denise Richards, Jaime King, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Marlee Matlin.

Zac: “They even delivered to me on location.”

News is ZEN is maybe about to open in the Big Apple.

I let you know this as Rosanna Scotto and I meet to inhale seconds of spaghetti in Fresco.

Making merry

An American Christmas: Tree from Canada, ornaments from Italy, lights from Japan, scarf from France and the idea from Bethlehem.

New Yorkers are excited. Only five more shoplifting days left.

This guy got his girl perfume. Surprise! She expected a ring.

Unhappy soldier: “Ten years ago I asked Santa for a soldier suit. Now I get it.”

She wanted an Italian sports car — but with the Italian sport still in it.

Definition of a beatnik: Santa the morning of the 26th.

Forget a white Christmas. Your wife’s talking ermine.

Three Washington, DC, politicians shopped early. Had to because what they were given was five to 10.

Twas the week before Christmas and all through the House — not a creature was voting — not even Santos the louse.

The Three Wise Men: Joe, Hunter and nice Uncle Jim.

And — hark! — the New Jersey Christmas carol:

Menendez was a little lamb

His fleece as white as snow

And everywhere this pol would go

Gold bars they seemed to grow.

Roseanne Barr, awash with the season’s greetings: “Holiday, no holiday, I only know the way I feel began in the early days — if the kids were still alive when my husband came home from work, I’d have done my job.”

ONLY with Roseanne, kids, only with ­Roseanne.