Caitlyn Paxson has a degree in writing and cultural history and has worked as the artistic director of storytelling performances, a harpist, a book reviewer, a nineteenth century jack-of-all-trades, a shepherdess, and a fake Victorian spirit medium. She lives on Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island with her husband and three orange cats. A Widow’s Charm is her debut novel.

www.caitlynpaxson.com  | @caitlynpaxson on Instagram

Welcome to the Hive, Caitlyn! We’re here to chat about your exciting new release A Widow’s Charm. To start us off, can you tell us a little bit about it?

Thanks so much for having me! A Widow’s Charm is a historical fantasy romcom about a determined widow and the necromancer she attempts to blackmail into resurrecting her dead husband but accidentally falls in love with instead. Hijinks ensue, including comical misunderstandings, a musical bedrooms sequence, and a rather winsome romance – and there’s a dog!

Lady Hildegarde Croft and Lord Elmwood are such delightfully disastrous yet lonely characters who I found so much fun to follow. Did their characters evolve significantly during subsequent drafts? 

Elmwood was the catalyst for this book. He started complaining in my ear when I was out for a walk one day and I instantly fell in love with his comedic misery. It was a real joy discovering what kind of person was underneath both his grumpy bluster and his rakish swagger – and I wouldn’t say that he changed much from one draft to the next. He was one of those characters that emerges fully formed – which is such a gift!

Hilde took a little more effort to get to know, and she kept surprising me with both the depth of her caring and the means she was willing to use to achieve her goals. But I don’t think she actually changed very much from one draft to the next, either. 

I’m a very character-forward writer, so I think that generally, my first drafts are about capturing the characters and their voices, and then the second, third, etc. drafts are more about wrangling the plot.

They also share some fantastic innuendos! How much fun were they to write? Did you have a favourite?

I think you can tell I was enjoying myself! I still get a big kick out of “Your badger hound is stuck in my crevasse.”

Their narrative also features some spicy scenes! How did your family/friends react when they first read them?

I would say that mostly they have politely avoided mentioning them! 

We meet some very memorable side characters along the way, a personal favourite of mine is Winthrop. Never before have I been so entertained by a lawyer! Who were your favourite side characters to write? 

I also have a real soft spot for Winthrop. He was another character who sort of emerged fully formed, and I love how obsessed he is with pulling off weird legal shenanigans. Him and Elmwood bantering were some of my favourite bits to write. 

Your world features the rare ability of Charms, where a Charmer has a certain magical ability. Lord Elmwood’s is that of necromancy and Lady Croft can ‘freshen’ rotting things. How did you go about deciding which Charm certain characters would have?

I wish I had a better answer for this but the characters just sort of emerged with their Charms already attached. Elmwood was a necromancer before I came up with the widow-blackmail plot for the book. And the very first scene I wrote with Hilde, she went down into the root cellar to Charm some onions and I rolled with it!

If you possessed a Charm what would it be and why? 

I love gardening but it’s always such a roller coaster of success and failure, so I think it would be lovely to have a Charm for growing things. 

Although A Widow’s Charm is primarily a historical fantasy romcom, in the vein of a Shakespearean comedy of errors, you also have darker themes of warfare, trauma and loneliness. How did you find maintaining this balance so that the narrative never became too dark?

It was a bit of a tightrope walk for sure, and I think every reader will have to decide for themselves if I managed it! I love when people say that it’s Shakespearean, because his comedies were one of my biggest inspirations for the book. And one of Shakespeare’s immense gifts is the ability to write something that is hilarious and bawdy and absurd, but that has themes and undercurrents that speak to real human experience and often suffering. If I’ve managed some small semblance of that, I’m delighted! 

 The cover art by Lydia Blagden features so many little Easter eggs as to what will feature inside the pages, I thought it was so fun! What were your thoughts when you first saw the cover? Was this the aesthetic you hoped would be portrayed?

 I feel like it’s a slightly difficult book to design a cover for because it has a lot of different genres wrapped up together. It’s a romance! It’s a magical fantasy! It’s cozy and domestic! It’s a comedy! It’s about death and trauma! That’s a lot for one cover to convey, and I’m really grateful to Lydia for coming up with a design that represents all those elements. And it was very fun picking out all the little items from the story to include. 

The next book, which will be set in the same world, features Lady Isolde and Han, who are both important side characters in this book. What can you share with us about their journey in book two? And will we see further side characters in future instalments? 

Issie and Han had so much chemistry that when I was first drafting A Widow’s Charm and they met in the middle of it, I started veering off into their story and then had to stop myself, because there simply wasn’t room for it. I promised them that if they would just behave themselves and let me finish the story I was already telling, I would give them their own book. 

Rogue Charmers takes place ten years after the events of A Widow’s Charm, when Han and Issie encounter each other in the city of Neck and embark on a rollicking adventure involving highway robbery, jailbreaks, a masquerade ball, and of course, more Charms. There are lots of fun new side characters, like a trick horse named Lord Tom the Wonder Horse and Issie’s chaotic daughter, Ysette, but we also get to check in on Hilde, Elmwood, and Winthrop, as well as everyone’s favourite badger hound, Rollo. 

Are you planning anything fun to celebrate your new release? Do you have any upcoming virtual events our readers may be interested in?

I’m very lucky to be embarking on a little tour of events across Canada and the midwestern US – details are available on my website, www.caitlynpaxson.com. No virtual events are planned at present, but if any emerge, they’ll appear on the website as well!

Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing?

I hope I can bring a little light and laughter to their day! 

Thank you so much for joining us today!

Thank you so much for reading A Widow’s Charm!

A Widow’s Charm is due to be released on 2nd April 2026 from Arcadia Books – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org