Blog Stop: Red Zone by Sherri Hayes

Today, Sherri Hayes is here on a blog tour stop for her new novel Red Zone.  I had a chance to pick her brain a bit in an interview (below), and you can read my review.  Enjoy!

About Red Zone:

After a case ended badly for Rebecca Carson, she’s losing her mind sitting around her apartment waiting on her superiors to allow her to return to work. Since she was a teenager, the only thing she’d ever wanted was to join the FBI. Now that dream was in danger.
Gage Daniels has made a pretty good life for himself. A nice house. A career he loves. As a professional football player, he’s used to getting almost everything he’d ever want with just the snap of his fingers. This includes women. A well-timed smile is usually all it takes to attract the opposite sex, especially in Nashville.

When a stalker threatens Gage, the team owner calls an old friend, Rebecca’s ex-partner Travis Hansen, to help protect his star quarterback and find the person responsible. Hansen offers Rebecca the job, and she jumps at the chance. It’s work, and it will get her out of her apartment. How bad can it be?
Posing as Gage’s girlfriend, however, isn’t as easy as it seems. The man is relentless. Rebecca must work to protect Gage while staving off his advances. She’s there to do a job, nothing more. The last thing she wants is to be another notch on a hotshot athlete’s belt.

As the stalker continues to up the ante, Rebecca finds it harder and harder to keep her distance from Nashville’s star quarterback. He isn’t what she expected in one of the city’s most notorious playboys. Now all she has to do is keep him safe until they can find his stalker, and hope she doesn’t lose her heart in the process.

My interview with Sherry Hayes:

Tell readers a little bit about your journey to becoming an author.

My journey wasn’t traditional. I was thirty before I began writing my first story. English wasn’t something I excelled at in school, so I never considered becoming a writer. After posting a few of my stories online, I was approached by my publisher. They’d read one of my stories and wanted to know if I had anything I was looking to have published. After getting some feedback online, I did happen to have such a story I’d been tweaking, so I sent it to them. Two weeks later I had a contract for my first novel, Hidden Threat. That was two and a half years ago.

In Red Zone, you introduce Gage Daniels. After reading it, I discovered this wasn’t your first book about the sexy Daniels brothers. What other stories are there, and what else do you have planned for them?

Red Zone is the second book in my Daniels Brothers Series. The first book, Behind Closed Doors, introduced readers to the second oldest brother in the Daniels clan, Chris and his lady, Elizabeth. There will be a book for each of the four brothers. Next up is eldest brother Paul. I’m hoping to have that novel out to readers sometime next year.

What are your biggest frustrations/stumbling blocks as an author, and how do you deal with them?

The biggest challenge I have writing is getting ‘in the mood’. I’m an emotional writer, so if I’m not feeling it, it’s difficult for me to put anything of worth into the computer. Sometimes that means finding some music that fits the characters. Other times it means walking away for a while and doing something else.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given?

Write what you like to read. You’ll never please every reader, but you can please yourself. That’s what’s important.

 The sex scenes in Red Zone were pretty steamy. How do you write your love scenes? (Music, visual stimulation, etc)

It depends. Sometimes, I write love scenes as I would any other scene in a story. Given the playfulness and passion with Gage and Rebecca, that was the case more often than not. If I’m having difficulty, however, I close my eyes and let the scene play out in front of me while I type. Having my eyes closed also helps with the logistics. It’s never good to have body parts in strange and unnatural positions. 😉

Where do you find inspiration for your stories?

I get inspiration everywhere. Behind Closed Doors was originally inspired by the memory of a book cover, and my Finding Anna series began with an idea spawned from my new interest in BDSM fiction and a news story about Jaycee Dugard.

Tell us something about Sherri, the woman, most people don’t know.

I love to sing, and in my early twenties I went down to Nashville to record a demo with a live band. It was loads of fun, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

What upcoming books do you have cooking in that creative mind of yours?

Truth, Finding Anna Book 3, is in edits right now, so I’ve been working hard on that. It’s scheduled for release this summer. I’m also writing the fourth and final book in my Finding Anna series. That one should be out to readers the first part of 2014. I’ve also been brain storming Paul Daniels’ book, and have already begun writing the first chapter of that one. He’s ready for his Happily Ever After, too.

Thanks to Sherri Hayes for the terrific interview!
Author Bio:

Sherri is the author of five novels: Hidden Threat, Slave (Finding Anna Book 1), Need (Finding Anna Book 2), Behind Closed Doors (A Daniels Brothers’ Novel), Red Zone (A Daniels Brothers’ Novel), and a short story, A Christmas Proposal. She lives in central Ohio with her husband and three cats. Her mother fostered her love for books at a young age by reading to her as a child. Stories have been floating around in her head for as long as she can remember; however, she didn’t start writing them down until she turned thirty. It has become a creative outlet that allows her to explore a wide range of emotions, while having fun taking her characters through all the twists and turns she can create. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found helping her husband in his woodworking shop.

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