I love a series, though I confess I’ve watched more than I’ve read, with the exception of all the time spent writing my own, the Mountain Women Series. If a work has a good cast of characters, a series gives readers as well as the writer an opportunity to learn more about them and to see them grow and change.
If you’ve read any of my stories, you know they have lots of characters, but not all are featured in every book. I love bringing back characters we haven’t heard about for a while.
The enigmatic, rather mysterious character of Charlie Herff has a larger role in the newest book in the series, The Meaning of Us. Charlie was nine in the first book; he’s about 30 now, and he’s had a troubled life. 
In this book there’s also an important reappearance of Silby, the young girl first portrayed in The Boardinghouse.
In following a series, we not only learn more about the characters, we begin to think of them as people we actually know, an extension of our neighbors, friends, or family. Great series characters may become part of our culture, like Hawkeye Pierce and the other memorable people of MASH, a series that may have helped change our ideas of war.
A number of readers have said they feel close to the people in my series, and some have said the fictional town of Winkler, West Virginia, was surely based on their own home town. Since I like the town and its people, I love hearing comments like that.
The Meaning of Us is now available in ebook, and the paperback is coming soon. You can read the first chapter here or download the ebook.