Resuming the Enchanted, Inc. Reread

I have been somewhat remiss in that Enchanted, Inc. reread I started in the fall, and since my reading lately has been rereading Terry Pratchett and therefore haven't had a lot of books to discuss, I thought I might as well pick it up again.

In case you need to review (I did), Here's chapters one and two, chapters three and four, and chapters five and six.

Of course, there are spoilers here, but I'm not getting ahead of myself so if you're reading along for the first time, I won't spoil past chapter seven here.

So, in chapter six, Katie goes to work at the magical company and finds that her job is anything but magical. It's like being part of a secretarial pool, and she's working with a bunch of annoying people. I tried to imagine what effect being immune to magic would have on someone's personality, and I figured that if you were around magic a lot but didn't know it until adulthood you might end up being kind of flighty or really geeky. Then unless you were pretty grounded, being a rare commodity might make you full of yourself. I think I was having fun with expectations there, making the magical workplace be rather drab, but I think that's a common experience, even without the magic. When you're interviewing for a job, they make it look like this wonderful place, and then it seems like an entirely different place once you accept the job and show up to work.

The crazy boss Gregor, who turns into an ogre -- literally -- when he gets angry, was one of the earlier ideas I had when I first started mentally developing this world, and he was based on someone I used to work with. He could seem totally reasonable and even nice, and then suddenly he'd snap. He didn't turn green, but he did turn a scary purple color, and he didn't sprout fangs and horns, but the effect was similar. I knew the moment I started thinking about a magical workplace that a boss who's literally an ogre would be absolutely mandatory.

Chapter seven was a lot of me playing with the premise, showing what Katie's job was really like. I must admit that I'd forgotten about the use of magic carpets on business after this book, so that's why they come back in book six. Otherwise, I was trying to show the "normal" of Katie's new magical life before I upended it again. We had to see what the potential problems might be and what her normal work was like in order to set up what she's going to want to change or have to deal with.

This is also when I started dropping hints that there's more going on. That's when the main plot first arrives after our origin story of getting Katie into this world has finished.

I think one of my favorite scenes in the book was the one where Katie visits Owen's office and spots the fake book, then sees and tries to fight off the intruder. That whole segment was so vivid to me, from the setting to the people. Just skimming it how, it pops right back into my head.

And this is when things start getting interesting ...