I decided a good idea for some new blogs would be to do a series of profiles for the characters in Tegan’s Blood. A lot of the history of my characters often just stays inside my head and never actually gets written into the story, but you get bits and pieces along the way. However, I mostly have to spend a lot of time thinking about a character in order to get into their head and write their personality. In this blog I’m going to focus on Finn Roe, a vampire slayer, and also one of my favourite characters to write. Maybe that’s because he’s the only human who’s Irish and has a background from a real country. My vampires come from different places but most of the humans are natives of my fictional city, Tribane.

To start off, here are his particulars:

Name: Finn Roe
Age: 28
Hair: Light brown, cropped
Eyes: Light blue
Height: 5″11
Build: Muscular/slim
Style: Clean cut/casual

I picture Finn as looking quite similar to the actor Desmond Harrington who plays Joe Quinn in Dexter (minus the perma-tan). Here are some pictures:

In the books I mention that Finn had a mother and sister who were killed by a vampire, which was what spurred him to become a slayer. This happened to him when he was twenty-two years old and it changed his entire outlook on life, before that he was a bit of a ne’er-do-well type, from a very working class background in Dublin. I imagine he had regular run ins with the police in his teenage years. I mentioned in a previous blog how I get a lot of ideas for personalities from different films, well the young rogue-ish Finn is very much like Colin Farrell’s character in the movie Intermission. Here’s the brilliant opening scene, although I don’t think Finn would ever punch a girl in the face, but the accent and demeanour is spot on. (If you have delicate sensibilities then perhaps you’d better not watch this.)

So as you might imagine, Finn wasn’t exactly an angel in his younger years. This thieving background came in handy when he became a slayer and needed to partake of various less than legal activities when hunting vampires. Another movie with Colin Farrell, where the character is more like an older Finn, is In Bruges. It’s genius and hilariously offensive, watch it if you like that kind of thing (I do), anyway, here’s the trailer:

Finn hates vampires, for the most part, although he’s been known to work with them temporarily if it suits his purpose. Once his mother and sister were killed he went slightly mad on revenge, but he’s a lot more mature now. When he first met Tegan he was bemused by her Goth style and lack of fear of the vampires, but was oddly attracted to her, which he didn’t like to admit to himself. Now he’s grown to care for her as a friend and might just have some vaguely romantic notions about her, perhaps.. Anyway, Finn is the kind of person who can be sneaky at times, but once you’ve earned his trust he’ll be a loyal friend to you for life. He thrives on getting into trouble. His best friend is Gabriel and they’ve known each other for a couple of years now, ever since Finn first came to Tribane. He has a talent for breaking and entering, as demonstrated in both books 1 and 2, and despite his tough appearance he’s actually a bit of a “whizzkid” with a computer. 

Well, that’s Finn in a nutshell, my next character profile will probably be Rita, although that might change. Thanks for reading:)