Jeremiah Tolbert

Charles Coleman Finlay is an author you are famil­iar with if you’ve read more than a cou­ple of issues of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His recent story, “The Political Prisoner” was a Nebula Award nom­i­nee and is cur­rently a Hugo Nominee and a Sturgeon nom­i­nee. And of course, it’ll be in the next vol­ume of Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best.

I’ve known Charlie since I started writ­ing through his involve­ment with the Online Writers Workshop. Charlie was the first pro­fes­sional author I really got to know, and he was immensely help­ful in help­ing me learn the ropes. It’s been really edu­ca­tional to watch his career progress, as he’s always been will­ing to share the ins and outs of his expe­ri­ences in publishing.

Let’s talk about the first book, and then head into the interview.

A Quick Review of The Patriot Witch

The first book of his Traitor to the Crown series, The Patriot Witch intro­duces us to the world of 1770s America on the verge of a war with the Empire. Our pro­tag­o­nist, Proctor Brown, would appear to be your aver­age farmer of the period. He has his wife picked out, plans to expand his farm. He’s a min­ute­man, but hopes that the scuf­fle that’s brew­ing doesn’t turn into a war, but if it does, he’ll clearly side with the patri­ots. But there’s just one other thing– Proctor Brown is a witch. He’s inher­ited his abil­ity from his mother, who is orig­i­nally from Salem, and has kept her tal­ent secret.

When Proctor wit­nesses the use of magic by a British sol­dier, he begins to real­ize that he may have to use his tal­ent and fight magic with magic. And he’s off on a wild adven­ture that takes him through some of the early bat­tles of the war.

Finlay’s writ­ing is tight, lean prose, and he espe­cially writes action well. I found myself hold­ing my breath a bit dur­ing some of the tense bat­tle scenes. One thing that really stood out is that war kills peo­ple much more inde­scrim­i­nately than I expected. The pro­tag­o­nist will be hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one and then five pages later, their leg will be blown off by a mus­ket. It really drove home the nature of war in this time period for me.

His take on magic is really inter­est­ing, and def­i­nitely draws from the lore of the time period regard­ing witches. Proctor is only just learn­ing what magic is capa­ble of, but by the end of the first book, he’s con­sid­er­ably more skilled than before.

The series is made up of 3 books: The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, and The Demon Redcoat. The first two books are already released, and the third will be out shortly.

An Interview with C.C. Finlay

Can you share with me a lit­tle bit about the day-​​to-​​day nuts-​​and-​​bolts of your writ­ing process? How did you make time to write the book, with your full fam­ily life and a full time job? How long did it take you to write the book from first con­ceiv­ing the idea to fin­ish­ing the book and sub­mit­ting it for publication?

There are four of us at home, includ­ing two writ­ers and two teenage boys, all piled up on top of one another. Our house isn’t big enough for us to have a room where Rae (my wife and some­times co-​​author, Rae Carson Finlay) or I can get away for enough peace and quiet to write. So when I’m work­ing on some­thing, I either do it late at night after every­one else goes to bed, or I leave the house and find some­place else to work. You’ll see Luck Bros Coffee in Grandview Heights, Ohio, men­tioned in the acknowl­edge­ments of my books. That’s because I set up office for months in one of their front booths, and they kept me qui­etly and effi­ciently sup­plied with fresh cof­fee and grilled cheese sand­wiches while I wrote.

How did you make time to write the book, with your full fam­ily life and a full time job?

The only way to make enough time to write was to take it away from other things. I gave up week­ends. I spent my weeks of vaca­tion hun­kered over the key­board. I neglected wash­ing dishes or vac­u­um­ing the house. I have three years’ worth of papers spilling out of boxes in need of sort­ing and fil­ing. But I don’t miss work, and I don’t skip my kids’ soc­cer games or school plays unless I’m out of town at a convention.

How long did it take you to write the book from first con­ceiv­ing the idea to fin­ish­ing the book and sub­mit­ting it for publication?

Back in 2006, my agent called me and asked if I had any ideas for his­tor­i­cal fan­tasy series. He thought that would take advan­tage of my back­ground as a his­to­rian and play to my strengths as a writer. I didn’t have any ideas at the moment, but I said if he gave me a week­end I’d see what I could come up with.

That was on a Thursday after­noon. By Monday morn­ing, I had a detailed out­line for the Traitor to the Crown series. Once I had the idea for a secret his­tory about witches fight­ing the Revolution, every­thing sort of clicked into place. Over the next cou­ple weeks, I wrote sev­enty pages of sam­ple chap­ters. Then my agent took the series to Del Rey to see if they were inter­ested. The nego­ti­a­tion process took about a year. I rewrote and added to the sam­ple chap­ters (sell­ing a short story ver­sion of it to Fantasy & Science Fiction), did research on the period and on witch­craft, and refined the outlines.

At the begin­ning of June, 2007, we had a deal. That’s when the writ­ing took off like a rocket. I was sup­posed to write the three books over nine months. It was closer to eigh­teen. The sec­ond book was the hard­est one to pull together. The third book devi­ated the far­thest from the orig­i­nal out­line, but all the pieces fell into place. I turned in the final book in January, 2009. So from first con­cept to all three books fin­ished and pub­lished took three years. The actual writ­ing was more like eigh­teen months.

I know that you’re the founder of the nov­el­ist work­shop Blue Heaven, with past atten­dees includ­ing Tobias Buckell, Greg van Eekhout and Sarah Prineas, and you thank sev­eral of your fel­low work­shop­pers in the acknowl­edge­ments. Can you give some spe­cific exam­ples about how the work­shop expe­ri­ence improved The Patriot Witch and the sub­se­quent books?

In 2007, I took 114 pages of The Patriot Witch and my out­line to Blue Heaven, and I hashed out the strengths and prob­lems of the novel in detail with Greg van Eekhout and Holly McDowell. In 2008, I only had about 250 pages of A Spell for the Revolution done, but Paul Melko and Daryl Gregory put it through the paces and made sure I got on track for the right end­ing. In both cases, being able to work­shop the par­tial novel and talk about the direc­tion it appeared to be going and the bet­ter direc­tions that it could go was essen­tial to my process. I didn’t have time to work­shop the third book, but by that time every­thing felt like it was click­ing. And I had Rae to help me as I wrote.

How did you con­ceive of writ­ing the story of Proctor Brown as a three book series? Was it a deci­sion made by the pub­lisher? Also, can you tell me a lit­tle bit about why the books are being released so closely to one another, seper­ated by only a month?

The Revolution lends itself nat­u­rally to a three-​​part nar­ra­tive divi­sion. The first stage of the war took place in New England, in and around Boston. The sec­ond stage of the war involved the over­whelm­ing British vic­to­ries and Washington’s ulti­mate recov­ery in and around New York and New Jersey. The third stage of the war involved the guer­rilla con­flict in the south­ern states and diplo­macy over­seas. There were many vol­un­teers who fol­lowed the war from one stage to the next, so it was easy to imag­ine Proctor as one of those men.

On the pub­lish­ing side, Del Rey was inter­ested in three books. The num­ber one rea­son read­ers buy a book is because they’ve read some­thing else they like by that author. Bringing the books out in quick suc­ces­sion cre­ates a shelf pres­ence and a chance for read­ers who like the first book to imme­di­ately move on to the sec­ond. Del Rey had done some­thing sim­i­lar with the Naomi Novik books and wanted to try it again.

It sounds like, also from your acknow­eldge­ments, that much of the research for the book came eas­ily due to your job as a research assis­tant. One thing that always strikes me as ter­ri­fy­ing about writ­ing sto­ries with a his­tor­i­cal basis is get­ting some of the details wrong. Was your approach here to basi­cally steep your­self so utterly in the time period via pri­mary lit­er­a­ture? Did you find any aspects dif­fi­cult to get “right”?

You’ll always get some­thing wrong. Four dif­fer­ent peo­ple copy-​​edited or proofed the book and a cou­ple errors still slipped through. It’s even worse when you’re doing the his­tory because you don’t have some­one there to check you on every sin­gle detail. Sherwood Smith, in her oth­er­wise favor­able review of the book, points out a mis­take about young ladies’ head­wear in the very first pages.

That said, what I did was spend as much time in pri­mary sources as I could, and not just writ­ten sources, but images of the cloth­ing, weapons, and archi­tec­ture of the period. Whenever I assumed I knew some­thing, I double-​​checked it, because you make the most mis­takes on the things you think you know. I tried to make sure the details enhanced the story, mak­ing it vivid and imme­di­ate, so I was also ruth­less about cut­ting out infor­ma­tion that didn’t drive the nar­ra­tive for­ward. In the end, the his­tory must serve the story, not the other way around.

The Traitor to the Crown series marks your first series. Your first novel, The Prodigal Troll, was pub­lished by Pyr. What were the pro­fes­sional lessons you learned from your first book that you took and applied in the writ­ing and mar­ket­ing to pub­lish­ers of your lat­est series?

The only lessons that I applied are in the writ­ing of the books. The Prodigal Troll was struc­tured more episod­i­cally, with dif­fer­ent POV char­ac­ters that made each sec­tion feel like it had come to a full con­clu­sion. That was a nat­ural out­growth of the lessons I had learned by writ­ing short sto­ries. In the new series, I kept the POV sim­pler and the nar­ra­tive whole so that these would be fast-​​paced books.

I don’t know that I have any use­ful lessons about mar­ket­ing to pub­lish­ers. Lou Anders was just get­ting Pyr started and he came to me as an up-​​and-​​coming author for his debut sea­son. He did every­thing he could to get The Prodigal Troll in front of read­ers, and I’m very grate­ful for the chance I had to work with him. With the new series, it’s a sit­u­a­tion where my agent and I were talk­ing with Chris Schluep at Del Rey from the start. Del Rey pub­lishes Naomi Novik, Harry Turtledove, Greg Keyes–it just seemed like a good fit. Luckily, they agreed!

Thanks again to Mr. Finlay for tak­ing the time to answer my ques­tions. I hope that you all check out his books. I can’t rec­om­mend the first one enough, and the sec­ond title is sit­ting in front of me as I type this, taunt­ing me.