Good morning, and welcome to Carding, Vermont.

Next Monday, April 14, the first chapter of my latest Carding novel called The Half Life of Dragons will be published here. Chapters will continue to appear every Monday until I reach the end of the book. (I’ve learned not to plan these things too much in advance because books have their own timetables.)

I wanted to take this time to give you an idea of what’s in store, and provide some background for those of you who are newcomers to this biggish town in Vermont.

Carding was inspired by the region where my husband and I live. Known as the Upper Valley, it’s a segment of the Connecticut River Valley that includes both Vermont and New Hampshire towns and residents. What makes us unique (or at least rare) is the cheek-by-jowl way our towns co-exist with one another despite the fact that half of us are in Vermont and the other half are in New Hampshire. 

And believe me when I tell you the two states can be very different at times. 

We’re connected by a series of heavily used bridges, sort of like teeth in a zipper, and we pass from one state to the other without really thinking about it. In other parts of the Connecticut River Valley, the separation between the good-sized communities on either side of the water is more pronounced.

For example, south of us lie the largish towns of Brattleboro, Vermont and Keene, NH. It takes a good 30 minutes to drive from one to the other (more when we all traveled on foot or horseback) so those communities developed separate identities, more or less. In the Upper Valley, it’s the work of a minute to cross a bridge (or in days past, use a ferry) to get from Vermont to New Hampshire and vice versa so the towns developed together.

I’m explaining this because when I created Carding, I fashioned its physical features from some of my favorite places in the Upper Valley. For example, Mount Merino and its condo development was inspired by Quechee, Vermont. The Corvus River has aspects of all of the rivers that snake through the Upper Valley—the Connecticut, the White, the Mascoma, the Ottaquechee, and the Ompompanoosuc. 

The Crow’s Head Falls are specifically the cascades of Bicknell Brook in Enfield, New Hampshire. The Carding green is an amalgam of the Norwich, Vermont green and Coburn Park in Lebanon, New Hampshire. And so on and so on. You get the idea. It’s the way I celebrate the natural beauty of the place where I am fortunate to live.

So to the story animating The Half Life of Dragons starts at Carding’s town meeting in early March when retired history teacher David Tarkiainen is granted the money to put together a group of volunteers to walk the town graveyards in order to check the accuracy of the municipal records . The five walkers are on their last cemetery near the Community Church when David discovers a fake grave with the name Timmen Eldritch scrawled on a makeshift headstone.

Timmen was the lead singer in a very popular and controversial rock band called Calliope. When it came time for the group to record what turned out to be their last album, he persuaded the band to buy a farmhouse in Carding so they could live together, commune style.

It didn’t go well. The band members clashed with the normally tolerant townsfolk right from the beginning, with scandal and outrage followed by scandal and outrage until a young woman named Ashley Bentsen and Eldritch disappeared. After that, the other members of Calliope and its followers fled town before the Carding-ites showed up with torches and pitchforks.

Within a month, Ashley returned home but refused to talk about why she left or what happened to her. Stories about Timmen, who had a mystical, wizard/lizard-like reputation, continued to pop up here and there but never for very long. Then, almost seven years ago, he reappeared in Carding for a short—very short—period of time.

No one has seen him since but his mystique lives on and on and on in a self-perpetuating media circus.

Now a legal struggle is brewing among the would-be be heirs to the Eldritch fortune, between those who want him dead and those who don’t.

And Carding, Vermont is the epicenter of it all.

Welcome to The Half Life of Dragons. I hope you enjoy it.

~ Sonja Hakala