FAQs

In short, everyone. The beauty of the Sherri’s work is that it reaches out to the entire world. Our fans come from all walks of life, religions, and age groups. They are male and female, and as diverse as the world we live in. We have toddlers and teenagers who come to signings dressed as characters and the oldest fan we know of is 102. Approximately 50% of our US fans are male (we have more in the UK) and we draw our readers from truck drivers, teachers, lawyers, producers, musicians, students, stay at home moms, soldiers, doctors, police officers, shamans, clerks, CEOs, office workers, gamers, ministers, bikers, accountants, wait staff, stylists, computer techs, reporters, construction workers, writers and you. Thank you for reading and for being part of our worldwide fan base. Kenyon Minions — a million strong and growing.

Never give up. Never surrender. Believe in yourself and your work and never let anyone tell you you don’t deserve your dream. Only you hear your characters and only you can breathe life into them.

That being said, to get started, the best thing to do is to join a writer’s group that specializes in the kind of fiction or nonfiction that you’re writing. You can do a search and locate organizations such as Science Fiction Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, Horror Writer’s Association, etc.

If you click on Resources above, I also have articles and such that are written for other writers.

I wish you much luck!

I’m so sorry that I can’t look at any unpublished works. It’s one of those rotten apple situations. Because I’ve had good friends sued. I’ve been cautioned by everyone I know that I should never, ever read unsolicited materials, story ideas, etc. Again, if you join a writer’s group, that’s part of the service they offer. Any unsolicited materials sent to me will go to Kim who will delete them without forwarding. Sorry.

These aren’t discrepancies. As in the real world, the characters change year to year. Some of them such as Acheron, Simi, Savitar, Xirena, Zeke, etc. don’t have a “set” human form. They can be any height or hair color or eye color they choose and they vary it just to mess with people’s perceptions. Others such as Stryker, Samia, Angelia et al partake of hair dye and haircuts.

It’s usually a year’s span of time between books and it may be several years before a character is seen again. In that time, they can and do get haircuts, change hair color and other such physical matters. In some cases such as Fang in Bad Moon Rising and Wren in Unleash the Night, the changes are shown on screen. But in others such as Sam in Dream Warrior, they get their hair done off camera. My real hair color is jet black and extremely curly. Most of you have never seen me with black hair and the red I choose varies all the time. Likewise, I often blow my hair out, but other times leave it curly. The characters are the same way.

Lastly, I write in what’s called deep character POV. Therefore, when you’re getting a description of a character, it isn’t always consistent with the last person’s POV you read from. Case in point, I always describe my brother as blond. Yet I’ve been corrected many times by others who call if brown. In my family of jet black hair, his hair is considered blond. Height and petite are also in the eye of the beholder. Acheron considers Tory petite and tiny even though she’s over six feet tall, because compared to him, she is. It’s why Nicolette seems different in Unleash the Night. Wren is the first character who describes her who doesn’t love her. He’s suspicious of her.

None of this is done out of author forgetfulness or lack of care on my part. It’s done intentionally to add realism to the characters and books. It’s now been over ten years since the first DH book came out. It would be weird and unreal if none of them had ever changed in the last decade. Think of it like the way TV show characters change season to season.

What writers influence your writing? That is probably one of the most commonly asked questions that always baffles me because when I ask for clarification, the interviewer always wants to know what fiction authors made a difference in my work.

The answer is simple. None.

While I’ve read fiction all my life and have many, many fave authors, none of them have ever made a difference in my writing in any way. I’ve never tried to mimic anything about them and even though their characters and books have stayed with me and lived in my heart alongside my own, they’ve never held any kind of influence over me. Yes, I’ve admired the beauty of how Oscar Wilde and Chaucer, as well as countless others turn a phrase, but that’s their style and while I love and admire it, it’s not my style or my characters’. Writing for me wasn’t like art where I studied another artist and tried to duplicate their expertise. I give other authors their due while I continue on my own by doing things, right or wrong, my way.

But as I was doing an interview earlier today, I realized something. There are actually writers whose works have influenced my writing. But not the way most people think. Since the day I discovered Descartes’s Passions of the Soul in sixth grade (I really was a precocious little monkey who read above a college level by fifth grade), I became enamored of philosophy, and, more importantly, philosophers. No, I didn’t understand everything back then, but I kept returning to those books and mulling their words, gaining more insight and understanding with every reread.

Over the years, I didn’t absorb and believe all their theories. Some of them just don’t work for my own philosophy and ethics (Rand jumps immediately to mind), but others such as Hobbes, Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, etc. appealed to me at my most fundamental level. More than that, they taught me to think and to evaluate human behavior for myself. I went from philosophy to psychology where I explored Jung, Pavlov, Skinner and countless others. That ability to understand the complexities, duality and most importantly the dichotomy of human behavior has influenced my writing heavily because it has influenced my cognition and forced me to evaluate every aspect of not just me, but every character I create.

Another great influence on my writing was a paper I wrote in college. My dissertation was simple and yet extremely complex. It was that human personality and individuality are defined not by our consistencies, but by our inconsistencies. Those weird quirks we all have- some for a reason and some simply innate. That is the cornerstone of humanity. And that is what I use in my writing.

Each and every book, each and every character, for me, is an exploration of the various, and often opposing, philosophies and theories I was exposed to by those writers. Without their work, mine would not be the same and so I guess in the future, I need a new answer whenever an interviewer wants to know what writers have influenced me.

The only problem now is figuring out the ones who made the most impact. Hmm… maybe I should say Homer and Hesiod, and of course, Plato… definitely Plato :)

Sherri has no control over where her publishers send her. She makes requests, but at the end of the day, it’s up to them where she goes for tours, and the location of stores. As a rule, they pick larger cities that are centrally located to give as many fans as possible the ability to come see her. They try to be fair and we’re sorry that Sherri can’t go to every city every year.

The playlist songs aren’t the only songs I listen to while writing any particular book. One book’s playlist is usually 100+ songs. But I select the 10 songs that most agree with the mood of the characters in that book, usually the hero’s point of view.

I’ve always written to music. It started in grade school. My oldest sister has severe Cerebral Palsy and is deaf. As a result, she screams all the time. The only way to concentrate was to play something really loud, to drown her out. I even slept with headphones on.

In college, I was given my own radio show (a punk one), that I ran for years. So music is, and has always been, a very big part of my life, and my books.

Actually, she does:

I actually answer that in every CON book, and in Infamous in greater detail. But the best explanation is found in the prologue of Infinity. There are lynch pin events that will not, cannot, and do not change. Major events such as Nick meeting Kyrian, Kyrian meeting Amanda, etc. will remain the same. Little details might alter- such as the exact time they meet i.e. Nick know meets Simi earlier, but he still doesn’t know who her father is… yet. Whether or not he learns that will depend.

What Nick is really trying to change is what he will become if he doesn’t save the lives of friends he loses and events we have yet to get to in the DH books. The only real thing he’s trying to change that is in DH books to date is the death of his mother.

Inferno will open with a glimpse of Ambrose’s future and what is awaiting Nick and why it is imperative that he save certain lives. The timelines will mesh and I do have it all worked out. When you read the two series, you won’t be lost or confused. It does all make sense. You just have to read it carefully. Everything is and has been foreshadowed from the very beginning.