True confession—I am so not a fan of the New Yorker’s short stories. To me, and this is a heretical act in the literary world, none of their stories contain anyone to like. There’s just angst, angst and then…nothing.

With so many lively, entertaining, thoughtful, and funny things to read, why spend precious reading time on such depressing stuff? And wouldn’t the authors have benefited more from having coffee with a close friend instead of inflicting their psychoses on the rest of us?

I guess my pronounced apathy (antipathy maybe?) to those short stories made me think I would never want to write them.

Oooh, I was so wrong.

With two Carding novels at different stages of development (Thieves of Fire is at the proofreader’s and Dazzling Uncertainty of Life is in its first incarnation), I needed something to finish in a shorter period of time. For my quilting friends, a short story is the written equivalent of a wallhanging instead of a bed quilt.

The more I work in Carding, the more enchanted the place becomes to me, and the more I realize how many stories there are tucked among my characters.

So last month, I wrote my first Carding short story and shared it with my quilt guild, Northern Lights, at our January meeting.

I had such fun doing The Tennyson Free Range Christmas Tree Farm that I immediately started another short story. I posted The Spirit of Aisle Two yesterday.

And now I’ve started a collection because stories number three and four are in the gate just waiting for pen time.

“They’re like peanuts,” I told my husband the other day.

So here’s the plan—ten short Carding stories published here, each one appearing on the new moon (I love lunar stuff) from December 2014 to September 2015. Then I’ll collect them all together for a book, adding an eleventh story to the pot. The book, tentatively called Carding Myths and Legends (though if you have a better title, I’m all ears) will be published in November of this year.