Featured Interview With Charyse Allan
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in Mesa, Arizona and spend most of my time dancing at my mom’s dance studio as a kid. After graduating from high school, I went to culinary school and became a certified pastry chef. I only pursued this career until a year after I had my first child, because the restaurant life is very demanding and usually requires you to miss every holiday with your family. My husband and I moved to the White Mountains of Arizona about two years after we got married and that’s where we now reside with our three children (soon to be four kiddos in April), two dogs and seven chickens.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I found my love of books in elementary school when my mom purchased multiple books for me in order to get me to read more. My only problem was, once I found a book I loved, I would read only that one over and over, until it was falling apart. It took until after I was married to broaden my reading horizons and I actually achieved a goal of reading 100 books in one year. I loved writing in high school and took multiple creative writing classes, and had a poem published my senior year. But I had a teacher who said I just didn’t have it, so I decided the culinary route was a better one. It wasn’t until a few years into my marriage that I tried my hand at writing a novel and ended up falling in love with creating worlds and characters who I could create book-hangovers with.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
One of my friends, Aprilynne Pike, is a very successful young adult author, and before I even met her, her Wings series was one of my absolute favorites and a huge inspiration to me. I also really love Justin Chen’s North of Beautiful. Those two authors showed me through their work how much fun and exciting it can be to write about those years that really shape us and push us to figure out who we are. Some other favorites would be basically every single one of Sarah J Maas’ novels, and I’m a sucker for the classic love stories, especially Pride and Prejudice—you just can’t beat Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet’s sweet love story.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My most recent novel is the third and final novel in my Valley of Death series. The entire series follows the main character, Payton Morros, through the trials she faces being a teenage assassin. She was adopted as a child and trained by her parents to be a killing machine, but one who kills with concentrated poisons that she and her adoptive father have created together. In the first novel, Gravel Ghost, she is faced with her hundredth assignment, and battles with the direction her life has taken, wanting nothing more than to be a regular teenage girl who goes on dates and gets into trouble. She abandons her hundredth assignment, after finding out her target is her best friend’s/newest interest, Conner’s, dad.
Through the end of the first novel and most of the second novel, Desert Fire, he tries to teach her what love really is and that she has a choice in which direction her life goes next, no matter what she was raised to be. In the second novel, her and her family, along with Conner, are on the run from the agency her family works for, known as the Elites. At the end, she finds herself stuck in their grasp.
Throughout this final novel, Desert Rain, she struggles with who she really is, while trying to rebel against the Elites who now hold her captive. The Elites want her to be their personal killing tool, but she wants nothing more to do with that life and will fight with everything she has to escape them, while trying to keep her humanity and compassion intact.
The very first novel only took me a month to get written, but the second and third took about three months each, since there was a lot more detail that had to be paid attention to. The series is hugely focused on love and what it can endure, but it is also jam-packed with action, gunfights, romance and family drama. You won’t want to miss a word of it!
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