Hi there, guys and dolls! Do you often hear voices in your head? Well I do, or should I say my girls Andrea and Heather do (sometimes I forget that I’m the fictional alter ego and my real writer girls exist, or is it the other way around…. I’ll have another drink at the well of inspiration and see if I remember to get back to you on that).

Anyhoo, talking about imaginary ramblings. My girls have been working on book four, now that life has settled down to a less roaring manageability. The Poppy Cove Mysteries are all about people, how they live, die and breathe in their Santa Lucia world. The characters drive the stories, what happens or what doesn’t happen to and for them. How do their lives grow, change or stay the same as their world shifts and shapes around them in time and circumstance. How do they act, react? What are their hopes and dreams? What fates occur to the fair social set and their fellow characters? What are their paths through their (fictional) lives?

Even though the people in the stories are not real in the physical sense, they do exist on some plane. They need a sense of grounding to be relatable to each other in the stories, and also to the writers and readers as well, in the course of time as the stories develop. As in day to day nonfictional life, every person goes through different interpretations of their experiences and surroundings, which create a sense of movement or stasis, in harmony or discord, depending on every detail at the time.

How does that effect the course of the characters’ journeys? Where do they go, what do they do? How gradual, how abrupt? Are they stagnant, in a rut? Constant or contradictive? So many questions, so many discussions. Trust me.

Also at what pace do the personal character tales flow? Who takes a back seat, who’s front and foremost in a particular story? What is revealing too much and what do the readers want to know about them? A sense of reality brings relativity, but a sense of the fabulous brings fondness for all of our own dream destinies.

As the girls talk, they realize that not only are the books about imagination, they are about humanity and the possibilities of what any of us could choose or achieve in both desirable and arduous circumstances.

I could go on, but I’d rather leave you with this, dear readers. Growth, change or stay the same? What do you want for you?

Toodles,

Barbara Jean