Please welcome award-winning writer Sherry Roberts. Her newest Maya Skye mystery has just been released! Sherry and I met at the IBPA publishing conference in Salt Lake City last month. Anyone who is from the beautiful state of Minnesota, feeds hummingbirds, and cycles, is a kindred spirit.
Sherry Roberts
It’s time to get your protagonist out of her comfort zone. You want to present her with a challenge and you’ve given her the following choices: climb Mount Everest; run a Marathon; trek across the Sierra Desert with a tribe of nomads; or sail around the world alone. Which would she choose?
Maya Skye, the star of Down Dog Diary and Warrior’s Revenge, is a yoga teacher and committed to helping others travel their individual paths to inner peace. Being raised in a commune and having traveled extensively (including living in an ashram in India), she would feel right at home with a tribe of nomads and their free-spirited lifestyle. She would find trekking across the Sierra Desert a meditation of sorts. And when bandits attacked the nomads, she would fight to protect the young ones and the helpless. After all, while Maya is dedicated to peace and enlightenment, she is attracted to mayhem.
If Maya could live in another time period, which would she choose and why?
Since Maya grew up in a commune in New Mexico, she practically did live in a different time period. Or maybe a better way to put it is she lived out of time. Whispering Spirit Farm was a community dedicated to the ’60s hippie values of live and let live, the Zen principles of planetary responsibility, and an incredibly naive do-it-yourself attitude. She was raised by tree huggers, spent a lot of time running wild in nature, and believed in magic (still does). She wouldn’t want to live in any other time, which would seem utterly restrictive to her.
If Maya could change anything in her life, what would it be and why?
Maya is burdened with a guilty secret: she killed a man. If she could go back into that New York alley and somehow save the woman being beaten, without killing her attacker, she would. While Maya’s mother, Evie, called it an accident and Maya’s father, Larry, said it was self-defense, Maya knows it was still an unforgivable act. But as her old friend James Tumblethorne, a Hell’s Angel turned shaman, once told her: “Some things can’t be changed, kid. They’re karma killers, and that’s the bitch of life.”
What do you and Maya have in common?
Maya and I both love yoga. We both believe that all humans seek inner peace and that all strife in the world would be resolved if we could just attain that inner peace. Like Maya, I love kick-ass movies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV show, not the movie), and nature. We each seek meaning in the natural world. Maya gets guidance from crows, which I find the most fascinating of birds. Highly intelligent and so loyal to family that they mourn the passing of a fellow crow, they are sentinels of the forest. If you look through a Maya Skye novel, you will see crows in the interior and on the cover. Also Maya has a thing for a certain journalist, and I married one.
If you and Maya had an argument, who would win and why?
Maya would because she keeps a punching bag in her closet. No, really, she would win because I dislike arguing; it takes too much energy. I am more the “let’s agree to disagree” type. But Maya also would seek a common ground just because she hates all those negative, argumentative vibes cluttering up her yoga studio and her life. She has been known to give her studio a thorough cleansing with sage to rid it of bad energy.
What’s in store for Maya in your next mystery?
Crows in large numbers (a murder of crows) invade Maya’s hometown, Gabriel’s Garden. The nervous townspeople are thinking Hitchcock’s Birds, but Maya knows this is a warning of trouble coming. While searching for an injured deer in the woods, she stumbles onto a dead body and a plan that could destroy the gentle life of Gabriel’s Garden.
Bio
Sherry Roberts is the author of award-winning mysteries and literary fiction. Down Dog Diary and Warrior’s Revenge are part of the Maya Skye novels—Minnesota mysteries with a yoga spirit. In Book of Mercy, a dyslexic woman fights a town banning books. Maud’s House is the story of an artist who loses and finds her creativity, and WriteTips is a guide to giving your writing power and improving your business.
She has contributed essays and articles to national publications and anthologies including USA Today and the Saint Paul Almanac. Her short fiction has been published in newspapers, literary magazines, and O. Henry Literary Festival Short Stories.
She lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota, where she feeds the hummingbirds, rides her bike, reads by the fire, bakes cookies, and practices yoga and tai chi.
Visit Sherry’s website at www.sherry-roberts.com.
Book Blurb for Warrior’s Revenge, the newest Maya Skye novel released May 1
When loss is too great, love can unhinge us all.
Threatening messages from a dead man send yoga teacher Maya Skye and reporter Peter Jorn down a trail of betrayal, revenge, and grief that ultimately will test Maya’s own depths of forgiveness as she and Jorn face an opponent not only bent on revenge—but murder.
From a scavenger hunt in Paris to a tent revival in her Minnesota town, the past is coming back with a vengeance, and it is bringing out the warrior in Maya.
Warrior’s Revenge is book two in the Maya Skye series. Down Dog Diary is book one. Both are available in paperback and ebook.
Links:
Sherry’s website: www.sherry-roberts.com
Sherry’s Facebook Author page: https://www.facebook.com/Sherry-Roberts-Author-121158521292405/
Sherry on Twitter: @sherryroberts7
Osmyrrah Publishing: www.osmyrrahpublishing.com
Warrior’s Revenge:
- On Amazon: www.amazon.com/Warriors-Revenge-Maya-Skye-Novels-ebook/dp/B01EMC6X2K
- On Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/warriors-revenge-sherry-roberts/1123723287?ean=9780963888082
- On Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/warrior-s-revenge
Down Dog Diary:
- On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Down-Dog-Diary-Sherry-Roberts-ebook/dp/B00GM25ZV4
- On Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/down-dog-diary-sherry-roberts/1117376210?ean=9780963888075
Thanks for being my guest today, Sherry!
It is my pleasure, Kathleen. I found the questions quite interesting or rather I was interested in how Maya would answer them. You know how you think you know someone then they show a new side? We’re all a mystery, I guess.
That’s what’s so enjoyable about writing them!