A great good morning to you, and welcome to the windy month of March.

I have a bit of news to share. Beginning in April, I am restarting the Carding Chronicles, short stories and sketches from the village that’s the setting for my novels.

Ever since the debacle of the November elections, I’ve been searching for a way to contribute more to the positive side of life. As I plowed through the coping advice offered by family, friends, and online columnists, I came across a quote from the French sculptor, August Rodin (he of The Thinker fame) that goes like this: “Patience is also a form of action.”

So I took a deep breath, stepped into silence, and waited, checking out ideas, and weighing them—could I do this? could I do that? would this help?

One of the most prominent themes in the advice I read was finding ways to connect with people such as joining a group that reads together or sews together or dances together or hikes together. I do some of that but I wanted a bit more.

I started my 5th Carding novel last fall, and I originally decided to set the Chronicles to one side while I work on it. But the Carding crowd are an impatient lot, and each of them has strongly held opinions that they want to express in their interactions with one another as well as with you.

In other words, they didn’t appreciate the fact that I had muted them, especially now.

I know that folks who do not have an obsessive need to write probably think that people who do are a bit…hmm, how shall I say this…weird when they talk about the characters in their books as “real.” But just as every human being has an inherent logic to their actions and a personality that’s recognizable as a cohesive unit, so do fictional characters.

Let me give you an example. Even if you’ve never read mystery novels, you probably know who Sherlock Holmes is–the ultra-logical, rather cold and demanding character invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and reinvented in the television series Sherlock and Elementary.

He’s a character you want on your side if you’re in trouble. But you wouldn’t necessarily want to have dinner with him.

My point is that you expect this character to behave in a particular way, and if he suddenly took on the personality of Mother Teresa, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s the same deal with every fictional character.

Over the course of four complete novels, two unfinished books, and a whopping big pile of Chronicles, I’ve had to figure out why Edie Wolfe has two grown children but never married, how Faye Bennett came to be so feisty, and the ramifications that ensued when Gideon Brown put a whole lot of space between himself and his father.

So I’ve become familiar with my characters’ backgrounds, how they view themselves in the context of Carding’s web of relationships. and whether they speak to one another when they pass in the street.

They are very real to me. They are the paints in my imaginary paintbox, and they are mixed and matched to bring the stories I want to tell to life on a page or screen.

All that means I miss the intense immediacy of completing short pieces of fiction on a regular basis. Books are fun because you really get to plumb the depths of your characters but they take such a long time to complete. So I’ve decided to do both.

The Chronicles will be back here on Mondays starting on April 14.

Thanks for visiting.