Writer’s Showcase: Iris Chacon

Genre: Romantic Mystery, Cozy Mystery

Background: My grandmother read to me from an early age, so I was in love with clever words from the beginning of my life. As a preteen I wrote plays and poems and won my first writing prize for creating lyrics to a school fight song at age 13. In my young adulthood I wrote screenplays and after that, I wrote short documentaries for non-profit organizations.

One day I pulled out a favorite movie script that hadn’t sold and decided to see if I could use it as an outline for a novel. Within a year I had published my first three novels and was working on the fourth. Nobody has been as surprised as I have, to see how well received my books have been.

Writing Highlight: For decades I’ve been working to produce high quality entertainment with the kind of wholesome worldview my peers and I enjoy. I know the real world contains profane words and sordid events sometimes, but neither I nor my friends and family live in that atmosphere, therefore, we don’t find those things entertaining.

I’m driven to give audiences and readers as much joy as I can pack into every page. Life is hard. What we all need is more good, clean, fun. Writing for stage and screen taught me a lot about dialogue. Here is a link where people can listen to a half-minute of dialogue from the audiobook version of Duby’s Doctor: https://youtu.be/5DajIrIBXO8

Next Project: I’m nearly finished with the long-awaited, much-requested sequel to my first book, Finding Miranda. All the quirky denizens of Minokee, Florida will be back and in rare form in The Mammoth Murders: The Minokee Mysteries, Book Two. The first book has won awards and fans; I’m embarrassed it has taken so long to answer fan requests for a second book.

A note about Iris is that I chuckled when I read that while she doesn’t ‘mind’ cat and dog people, she’s a rabbit and horse person herself. As a current rabbit owner and former horse person myself, this spoke to me. Rabbit-loving-readers unite!

Iris Chacon webpage and blog: https://www.authoririschacon.com/

Iris Chacon book page: https://authoririschacon.com/get-the-books/

Irish Chacon book trailers: https://authoririschacon.com/book-trailers/

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Writer’s Showcase: Caron Allan

Genre: Mystery (Friendship Can Be Murder series), Romantic Historical Mystery (Dottie Manderson series).

Background: I wrote my first novel Ghosts! Ghosts! Ghosts! in 1970 and unfortunately it is now lost because my mum kept it in a drawer with my drawings, a knitted bookmark and a tea-cozy I made. I started reading adventures at age seven or eight and was reading Agatha Christie by age nine. [Eventually] I remember sitting on my bed in Aldershot, Hampshire, UK, and thinking, I want to write a new story, but what shall I write about? Then I thought, what is it I am afraid of?

Writing Highlight: I had to overcome [close] people telling me that a) I was no good as a writer, b) it was wicked thing to want to write fiction, and c) who did I think I was anyway, thinking I could be a writer? So I destroyed a large amount of my writing, which I now regret.

I have spent years working on books: the first draft of Easy Living was written in 1997 and I was finally ready to share it with the world in March 2019. In my historical mysteries, I am trying to give the reader a fairly authentic yet accessible experience (books written in the 1930s are ‘wordy’ and formal for modern readers.) While I modernize compared to the way things would have been written, I keep manners and lifestyle quite close to how they would really have been.

I also like to encourage people of all ages and backgrounds to write.

Next Project: I am currently working on book five of the Dottie Manderson series; it will probably be out in the beginning of September. I have loosely planned at least five more books in that series.

I’m also working on another stand-alone book, set in the mid-1940s, right after the war, (yes, a mystery.) On top of those, next year I plan to embark on another series called the Runaway Writer.

To keep up with Caron Allan: https://caronallanfiction.com/

Book page with links for purchasing in different countries: https://caronallanfiction.com/my-books/

A note about Caron is that not only has she overcome the disparaging remarks of previous critics of writers and her writing, she has a wicked-good sense of humor. I knew she and I would hit it off when I read that when she “isn’t plotting how to kill people” she spends time in the local shops looking for everyday items that have “lethal potential.”

Now that’s my kind of shopping and my kind of creative writer.