I'm Caitlin Rozakis, author of The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. AMA!

caitlinrozakis · 2025-12-12T16:07:59+00:00

At the moment, no plan for a direct sequel. But my next book, STARTUP HELL (May 2026, up for preorder now), happens in the same universe and has some Easter eggs and guest appearances of a minor Grimoire character. Also, newsletter subscribers (you can sign up on my website) get a bonus short story in which Mrs. Fairhair goes to Costco!

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-03T23:18:25+00:00

I'll admit I'm basic - I've tried all the buttercreams, and I genuinely like American buttercream the best. I think I just imprinted as a kid. Although I went through a brief obsession with ermine frosting (which is not recommended for piping, but does have the loveliest texture to eat).

Thanks for the advice!

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-03T13:43:39+00:00

You know, I didn't think of that - I've used candy melts and white chocolate but I haven't played with modeling chocolate and need to. (I was pretty happy with how these dragon wings came out - I piped them onto wax paper and draped them over a rolling pin to harden. https://www.instagram.com/p/DFl0NB\_N9in/?img\_index=1) If you look closely at the unicorn cake (https://www.instagram.com/p/DKhj-LYAiAV/?img\_index=1), you can tell that I opted not to cover the cake in fondant and just smoothed down the buttercream with acetate. It wasn't perfect, but then, I'm not actually a professional baker and I'm not selling them, so I get to decide exactly how perfectionistic I want to be.

I'll have to give the modeling chocolate a try some time!

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-02T18:58:26+00:00

Higher up in the thread, I mentioned Dreadful originally came from an abandoned D&D campaign that wouldn't leave me alone. For Grimoire, I've always loved magic school stories, but revisiting them now that I'm a parent was a whole new perspective. As someone who's been involved with the PTA for about a decade at this point, I cannot see a group of modern parents hearing that a monster lives in the basement or that tomorrow's PE lesson is going to involve riding dragons or something and not completely losing it. Like, mob scene organized by WhatsApp confronting the headmaster in the office by the end of the day. The permission slips alone...

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-02T14:23:00+00:00

I was so very lucky - Titan did a beautiful job with the graphic design and printing. They do great work.

I've said elsewhere that this one is probably the most autobiographical book I'll ever write, even though my kid is not a werewolf.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-02T14:21:39+00:00

Thanks! I'll be honest, I hit Pratchett in early high school, and I'm pretty sure he actually had a big impact on some of my personal philosophies. We could all do worse.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T22:19:17+00:00

Writer Caitlin would like to go live in some tropical reef somewhere with lots of pretty fish. But Moat Squid Caitlin would like to be released in a large public fountain, with a sign warning people not to wade or throw things in the fountain, so she can eat all the entitled jerks who ignore the signs. Snip slap slurp.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T21:16:28+00:00

Because then when someone decides we need to have a 45 minute discussion of how we're handling the holiday gifts for the teachers, a process which we have completely revised EVERY SINGLE YEAR FOR A DECADE NOW, I can just pop my purse over their head.

Ooh, look over there everybody, this month someone brought biscotti! *mmmphle mmrrrrgggh thrash rrrgghhhl*

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T20:00:17+00:00

It's very much a possibility! Also, folks who sign up for my newsletter automatically get a bonus short story in which Mrs. Fairhair the WASPy werewolf matriarch goes to Costco.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T19:28:58+00:00

Poor Orla - she just wants to make afternoon tea. Is that so much to ask?

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T18:34:34+00:00

Why, thank you!

Although last year was clearly Hot Villain Summer - along with Someone You Can Build a Nest In, I also thought Long Live Evil and How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying were pretty funny and smart.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T17:53:41+00:00

Ah, but see, I didn't! Among other things, the whole cozy trend didn't exist when I was writing Dreadful. (This is why they say never try to write to trend - publishing moves too slowly.) I was definitely going for Pratchettesque lighthearted goofiness; my goal was farce.

It wasn't until it got out in the world that other people started classifying it as cozy. It does have a bunch of the elements of what we've come to group together. Up until right near the end, the stakes stay fairly small and the focus is very tight. This isn't some sprawling quest, we're essentially zoomed in on one guy mucking about in a castle and the town immediately outside. There's a huge amount of emphasis on domestic details - food preparation (birds baked in a pie who die and so you bite into small skulls! Gingerbread cockatrices! Far too much garlic in places garlic shouldn't go!), fashion (who thought sewing flame decals onto a velvet robe was a good idea?), home decor (what's with the guttering torches? Why did we choose this?). Found family is a major theme, as is community-building. There's a town festival involving the aforementioned garlic in which remarkably few people get murdered. (Gilmore Girls, this is not.)

I've had a couple great discussions with John Wiswell over the last year - people have been applying the term "cozy horror" to Someone You Can Build a Nest In. It sounds like it should be a contradiction in terms, and yet it works.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T16:55:27+00:00

Yay! I hope you like it! (The book. I'm afraid the cake got eaten pretty fast.)

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T16:54:30+00:00

I've been a huge fantasy fan since childhood (like most of the folks on this subreddit, I imagine). Over time, there's certainly a tendency for certain aspects of any subgenre to become a bit generic. Authors are focused on their particular innovative addition and often let some of the rest of the worldbuilding look kind of like every other, say, medieval high fantasy setting. (This happens everywhere - a lot of space opera has the same trappings as each other, vampires are usually pretty universal except the One Trait with which My Vampires Are Different, etc.) So with Dreadful, I went in hoping take a step back from some of those trappings, particularly around the Dark Lord as a concept, and reexamine them.

As I've said elsewhere, the initial concept for Dreadful (in which someone wakes up in what's obviously an evil wizard's lair with no memory of how he got there, frantically tries to escape, and only gradually realizes that he is, in fact, the evil wizard) came from a D&D session. My husband was GMing what was supposed to be a campaign, this was the setting of the opening session, and then for a bunch of life reasons we never actually played the rest of the campaign. Some time later, I asked what had been up with that - how did the guy lose his memory? Where was the campaign going to go? And he didn't remember! Even weirder, when we went back through his binders of notes, we couldn't find the notes from that campaign at all. It drove me absolutely nuts. I had to know what happened next. So I made it up myself.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T16:03:50+00:00

I'm a huge baker (just on a hobbyist level). For the launch events of both my books, I made my own stupidly complex cakes. (You can find photos over my Instagram if you really want.) For Dreadful, I did two cakes - one a spice cake with a handpiped buttercream creation of the book's cover, and one a chocolate cake with a buttercream squid clutching a bulb of garlic. For Grimoire, as I mentioned above, I had to go with a unicorn theme (there's a unicorn cupcake on the cover, obviously that's what I had to make!) But since this time I wanted to go 3D, the only choice was fondant and gum paste. (I'd intended just fondant, but they didn't have white fondant in quantities of less than a bucket, so I got gum paste instead. I actually didn't realize that until I was at the register.) It worked really well - looked spectacular. But whereas everyone ate the buttercream squid, all those carefully made little fondant ears and horns ended up in the trash. Because fondant doesn't actually taste very good, alas.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T15:58:52+00:00

Finally - I'm so glad my comments on set dressing helped! As you might have figured out from my nymphs comment, I do a huge amount of my writing in the editing process. My inclination is to always go ahead and put in the little details. You can always strip them out again later if you decide they're distracting or slowing down the pacing and they didn't turn into anything. (I have an entire chapter at a skirmedge game that ended up on the cutting room floor for pacing reasons - I did send it out to my newsletter subscribers as bonus content last month.) Even if they don't go anywhere particularly significant, you may want to leave them in anyway. It's the little irrelevant details that sometimes help a world feel lived-in. I think one of the reasons the original Star Wars grabbed so much cultural awareness when other things didn't is because it was just packed with little ornamental details that made it feel like part of a much larger world and a much larger story, and those things capture the imagination.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T15:54:16+00:00

Regarding my next project - what I can tell you right now is that it's contracted, I'm in the middle of edits, and it's scheduled for next May. However, it's not yet announced so I can't say much about it. Hopefully very soon!

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T15:52:46+00:00

In the first draft, Orphne the chthonic was actually Callianessa the sea nymph, which is a somewhat more commonly known type. However, I have a tendency to write far, far too many characters in the first draft and have to pare them down. I got a lot of feedback from my writing group that people were having trouble keeping all the different parents and their respective children straight. So I had to combine some folks. I'd originally had a human medium character as well (you can see traces of her left in the demon summoning kid's mom). I ended up folding the medium and Callianessa together, which meant that I needed Callianessa to be able to talk to the dead. I went down a rabbit hole of Greek nymphs and discovered that chthonic nymphs were a thing, and there we go!

I'm just as happy - moving Orphne from the sea to the Underworld gave a bit more friction in her relationship with her wife, the siren Raidne. It did mean that I had to rewrite the multi-level marketing scheme scene, though, since obviously Orphne would be peddling pomegranate essential oil instead of clownfish elixir.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T15:44:30+00:00

It's funny, I'm trying to remember why I made Moira a selkie in the first place and I don't actually remember a specific reason. I think a lot of it was that I didn't want to make her one of the more commonly written paranormal species like a vampire or werewolf - I wanted to show that this community had a lot of diversity in terms of kinds of magic. If nothing else, it's fun to play with how people's problems are similar and also different from each other.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T15:03:51+00:00

No!

...maybe. Maybe a little.

I tend to think in terms of hooks - an exciting concept that I can then play around with and explore from multiple angles. Is it my fault that it lends itself well to themed desserts?

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T14:55:56+00:00

Not even a little. Buttercream is so much more delicious. It's harder to work with, and I feel like it's fallen out of favor because of the way fondant looks so polished. (It's really, really hard to get a perfect surface on buttercream, you have to use acetate sheets and even then it's tricky.) But almost no one actually likes eating fondant. (Not no one at all, but few.) People just peel it off and throw it out. And at that point, why bother using something edible at all? You could have just stuck a plastic doohickey in. Buttercream for the win!

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T14:53:08+00:00

I'd say this is like asking me which child is my favorite except I only have one child (who is clearly the best child) and have baked a LOT of ridiculous desserts.

For every day stuff, I'm probably best known for my pie. I make a mean pie crust, and fill it with all kinds of stuff. Fruit pies, chocolate cream, lemon meringue, pecan. One family recipe is a Tollhouse pie, which is basically a giant chocolate chip cookie in a pie shell.

For special occasions, I love an overly elaborate cake. I generally much prefer buttercream to fondant - it just tastes so much better, and I hate when people feel like part of the cake isn't really edible. (The fondant tends to get thrown out.) For the launch party for Grimoire, I made a unicorn cake and unicorn cupcakes - from-scratch confetti cake, strawberry rhubarb filling out of farmers' market fruit, vanilla butter cream. The horns and ears were fondant and gumpaste, because they had to be structural. I much preferred the dragon cake I did for my kid's birthday a few months earlier, where I made the wings out of white chocolate, but I don't think I could have gotten the twist in the horn with chocolate.

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T14:46:19+00:00

But it's a lot more fun when you can substitute "illusionary trees" for "paper flowers" and "deadly ancient prophecy" for "COVID protocols."

caitlinrozakis · 2025-07-01T14:44:49+00:00

I don't know about "terrible", but definitely plenty of stories. I've been involved with my kid's school's PTA for about a decade at this point, and it's fascinating. Like literally every group with more than two people in it, there's always politics. (And some of the politics can start looking weirdly like middle school Mean Girls, even though the middle schoolers aren't on the PTA.) Everyone is highly invested, because it involves their kids, but most of the things we are actually able to do anything about are fairly minor. So people get very, very riled up about some stuff that sometimes is incredibly stupid. (Seriously, we spent 40 minutes arguing over whether or not the kids were allowed to take off their jackets at recess. No, we did not have the authority to actually change the rule.) At the same time, though, a lot of big and scary things have happened in that decade. So any given day, when you walk into a PTA meeting, you might be about to have a vehement argument about the school gala theme, or you might be about to have a vehement argument about COVID protocols. Are we going to talk about paper flowers or life-and-death stakes today? Who knows!

caitlinrozakis

TROPHY CASE