End of Fistful of Charms read along

A Fistful of Charms is probably my favorite in the series until we get to Pale Demon. So much has happened by this point, but the world is set and the magic still unfolding. Rachel is familiar enough to be a comfortable narrator but still evolving as a person. Her decisions of the past are starting to impact her present, and she feels real. It’s a good place to be as a writer, especially when I was looking at an extension of my original three-book contract into six. The world had just opened up, and I was free to slow down and delve into new areas. Heaven for me. I think you can see that in the contented ending I was able to give this one.

I like the ending of this one where they are all in the kitchen making pizza and feeling good about where everyone is in his or her life. We still don’t know what the curse did to Jenks in the long-term, so there’s a touch of sadness, but I’ve already started to lay down the clues. (he’s faster!)

It would be impossible for anyone to write fiction without putting something of themselves or their experiences in the pages, and it’s here that you can see Guy’s and my tradition/love of making pizza every Friday for pizza and movie night. It began, quite honestly, from the pressures of a young family and little income, and that first pizza was truly awful, the crust from a box, sauce from a jar, and processed cheese shreds and toppings. I can’t tell you if we actually saved any money making our own pizza. (They didn’t have the 5 $ deal back then.) But we had a good time making it, and that was the point.

The crust was horrible, though, and that was the first thing we changed. I’d worked with yeast dough before, so getting a true crust was easy. (I can now toss a good dough like a pro.)

The toppings have changed over the last 20 years. I think cheese was the first topping we went home-grown with, getting rid of the filer-based bags and going right to the real stuff and shredding it ourselves. We had to let the pepperoni go when we found out the preservatives used sulfites. (Gives Guy migraines. Can you imagine getting a migraine from pizza?) But we get creative now, and you can get sulfite-free bacon if you hunt for it. The pizza sauce was the most recent shift, from jar to home-made. Guy is still tweaking it.

Ahhh, that’s not to say that we don’t have a delivered pizza every now and then. Because after all, pizza is pizza, no matter who makes it!

I have no idea how I got to here, talking about pizza, but reading those last pages of A Fistful of Charms, you can see a little slice of me. Just a little.

We’ll start reading For a Few Demons More next Tuesday, right after we give the FOC prize packs away. Flash-giveaway starts Monday morning and runs for 24 hours. Guy and I actually found three hardcovers to give away. (One is a library bound, but it’s never been on the shelf.) These have been out of print as a hard cover for a long time. You just can’t find them anymore. I’ll tell you how to enter on Monday, but I promise it’s easy and open to International.