My interview with Charles Coleman Finlay now up at the Nebula Awards site

Just click here for the interview. For a little bit of background, keep on reading.

This interview was conducted via email between April and May. Charlie was very gracious in putting up with my delays at the time (if I recall, this was when I had just interviewed for my present job and was in the process of doing the onerous tasks of readying my public school students for their US History exit exam in early May) and the two of us had fun talking about history as well as the fictional elements of his latest series.

When I was conducting the interview, only the first book in his series, The Patriot Witch, had come out. Now all three volumes are available in MMPB format. As a historian (albeit one who focused on modern German cultural/religious history and not on colonial American history), I am wary whenever someone attempts to write historical fiction, since my mind is geared toward parsing the text much more rigorously than I do when I'm reading imaginative, speculative fiction. However, I can say that I found The Patriot Witch to be very enjoyable, with the historical elements of the impending 1775 outbreak of rebellion meshing well with the character of Proctor Brown and other practitioners of witchcraft (Salem being "real" for the witches in this setting). The pacing was very fast-paced and I hope to get around to reading the final two volumes, A Spell for the Revolution and The Demon Redcoat, in the very near future.

Hopefully, there will be people curious enough about the interview and my short synopsis that they'll check out Finlay's work. Also, there will be another interview of mine, this time with Jeffrey Ford, that'll be posted on the Nebula Awards site sometime in the next few months. That one is the longest interview, at just over 8200 words, that I've ever conducted.