1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
Hi, all! I’m Caitlin, best known for writing fantasy satire. After graduating from Princeton, I’ve had too many career changes, including mechanical engineering (cut short after the murderous robot incident), finance (amortizing tequila receivables is not as fun as drinking tequila), and the American Museum of Natural History (who knew emus had birth certificates?), and a number of marketing positions, some at companies you may have even heard of. Currently, I live in Jersey City.

2.- When did you start writing?
I’ve been writing since elementary school - I even won a short story contest in my local newspaper in I think sixth grade. But my first short story wasn’t published until 2007, and my debut novel came out last year (2024).

3.- You have works published under the pennames R. Rozakis, Caitlin Rozakis and Catherine Beck. Could you tell us a bit of the story behind those different pennames?
Combination of marketing and indecision!
My actual name is Rebecca Rozakis. I originally started publishing short stories under that name because, well, that’s my name! The problem is that I’ve spent more than 15 years in corporate marketing at this point, and there’s now a fair number of blog posts and whitepapers and stuff that’s by Rebecca Rozakis, that no one who wants fantasy books is going to care about. So I realized that I’d need a pen name to help people find the thing they were actually looking for. So Caitlin Rozakis got her own website. Yay branding!
The second problem, though, is that while I was out querying with my fantasy novels, I self-published a contemporary romance novella, which is very different in genre (although not really in tone) from the rest of my work. I was worried that the novella would get me pigeon-holed when I don’t currently intend to do a lot of work in the contemporary romance space. So I needed another pen name. 
None of it’s particularly secret - it’s just about helping set readers’ expectations and help them find what they actually wanted.

4.- Do you find much different writing short stories from writing full-length novels/novellas?
Honestly, I prefer longer form writing. While you always need to be economical with every sentence, you have a lot more room in novellas and novels to develop complex characters and take little detours. Short fiction needs to be incredibly disciplined.

5.- Dreadful was your debut fantasy novel. How did the idea for it appear?
Many years ago, my husband started running a D&D campaign with essentially the opening premise of Dreadful. You wake up in an evil wizard’s lair, no idea how you got there, try to escape, discover the evil wizard is you. Life got in the way, we never got past the first session, and a year or two later, I remembered and asked “Hey, what was up with that? How did my character lose his memory?” And he had no idea. Couldn’t remember. We went back to look for the notes, which he always keeps; the notes were gone. It drove me absolutely bonkers. I had to know.
So I had to make it up myself.

6.- Which part of writing Dreadful would you say it was the more challenging?
I have a horrible process that involves thorough outlining, writing the whole thing, and then completely ripping a book apart on the revisions. In Dreadful’s case, I had two problems. First, I had too many characters, who were used unevenly. Eliasha was originally two different people, a princess and her illegitimate half-sister who was trying to rescue her. I had to smoosh them together into one person. But worse, the original climax of the book didn’t match the tone of the beginning at all. It was really dark and heavy. I ended up rewriting approximately a third of the book to get it to land on the tone I’d originally envisioned.

7.- A bit of an offtopic, but your novella (written as Catherine Beck) Leah’s Perfect Christmas got adapted into a movie. Could you tell us a little bit about the process and how it is the part of being the author of the movie?
That one was complete luck–a producer happened to see the Facebook ad and picked up the book on a whim, and then called me. It ended up getting adapted into a Hallmark original movie, Leah’s Perfect Gift. It was a weird process beginning to end–I genuinely thought the writers’ strike had killed it, but last July they suddenly called me and told me they had a shooting date in September.
I got laid off in August from my day job, which was unfortunate, but the silver lining was that meant I was free to fly out to Vancouver (on my dime, not theirs) to be on set for the last two days of filming. (If you look carefully, I’m in the background in the Hanukkah party scene.) It was enormously fun–the cast and crew were incredibly gracious and welcoming. I don’t know how much was because it’s Hallmark and how much was because most of them were Canadians, but it was an incredibly positive set to be on.
I wasn’t the screenwriter on this, and I didn’t have much say in the adaptation–I never even saw the final shooting script, so when I hosted a watch party in my living room, I was as surprised as anyone else. The movie is substantially different from the book, which is unsurprising given that Hallmark has a pretty strong formula. But it was a lot of fun.

8.- Your next book, The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, will be published in the next days. How do you feel about it?
This one is pretty close to my heart–while I have never been an evil wizard, I absolutely have been on a PTA. Modern parenting is wild!

9.- Could you tell us about which idea was the seed for The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association?
Like a lot of us, I grew up on stories about kids being whisked away to a secret school to learn magic. Then I had a child of my own. And I realized exactly how bizarre and insane it is to send your kid off to some place you’ve never heard of to learn to cast fireballs and save the world. Do you know how much angst there is on the parents’ WhatsApp when the field trip bus gets caught in traffic and is going to be late? Do you really think today’s parents would be chill about monsters in the school basement?

10.- Is there any particular character in your book that ended being your favourite?
Mrs. Fairhair is so very much fun to write. She’s the pack leader of the local werewolves and she is also the WASP-iest WASP to ever WASP. Think Emily Gilmore if she could periodically change into a wolf and rip the throats out of whoever crossed her at the DAR meeting. Without getting blood on her silk blouse, of course. I liked her enough that I wrote her a short story of her own - “Family Pack” is the bonus gift to anyone who subscribes to my newsletter. 

11.- Which other pieces of media would you recommend to people that enjoyed The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association?
If you like the “magic school from another perspective” angle, Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent is another recent release, this one from the school administrator’s POV. For snarky fantasy, you can never go wrong with Terry Pratchett and Gail Carriger.

12.- What can we expect from Caitlin Rozakis in the future?
Let me put it this way–keep an eye on Titan Books’ announcements in the next week or two.