Celebrating Moms

 

This is the eleventh Mother’s Day that I will celebrate without mine. A year-and-a-half before she died, I wrote a poem to her and all mothers. I suppose it works best for mothers of young children, but it celebrates all of them. Here it is.

For Mother’s Day

 

More precious than diamonds,

     More fun than movie nights,

Sweeter than chocolate,

     Lovelier than roses.

 

Mothers.

 

Necklaces, rings, and bracelets,

     Tear-jerkers and popcorn,

Cadbury, Godiva, and Fannie May,

     Fragrant Damask and climbing Floribunda.

 

Mother’s Day gifts.

 

Best of all are happy children,

     Sentimental verses sincerely meant,

Gifts made with childish hands,

     Burnt toast on breakfast trays.

 

Love.

 

Happy Mother’s Day.

Cheap Art

 

My regular readers know that I love photography. I’ll never be an Ansel Adams or a Dorothea Lange, but I enjoy taking pictures and seeing what I can do with them.

Over the years I’ve used my images for jigsaw puzzles, placemats, note cards, mugs, and, of course, wall art. My office is decorated with photos from my travels and our dining room has a wall of Lake Michigan lighthouses, but my most recent venture is our newly remodeled bathroom. Instead of re-hanging the art we had before, Roland suggested using some of my photographs. And since the predominant color in the bathroom is now grey, I suggested using black-and-white images.

After going through some of my photos, we decided on a waterfall theme and selected three images to enlarge and hang. The one at the top of this post is Multnomah Falls in Oregon, which I took while on a cruise of the Columbia and Snake Rivers in 2025. The two that follow were both taken in Minnesota during a 2015 research trip. The first is the High Falls at Pigeon River, and the second was taken somewhere along Minnesota 61.

The title of this post is a little misleading, though. By the time I paid to get the images blown up to 20 X 16 inches, bought three nice frames, and replaced the original plexiglass in the frames with a non-glare version, it wasn’t cheap art. Still, I’m happy with the result and prefer what we have to something we might have bought “off the rack.”

It’s nice to have a hobby that I can get some use from.

I Thank God for My Beta Readers

 

I am currently revising a middle-grade historical novel to incorporate my beta readers’ comments, and I just received the evaluations back on another one. The responses highlight how important beta readers are to the writing process.

It’s been a while since I was my readers’ age, and when I write for boys I have the further disadvantage of never having been one. So it’s extremely helpful to get feedback from members of my intended audience. Fortunately, a local school has been responsive to my request for beta readers from the third through sixth grades.

One of the questions on my evaluation form asks if the beginning of the story makes the evaluator want to keep reading. Most of the time the answer is “yes,” although the reason might be fairly vague. Each of the last two times I asked for feedback, however, I got a couple of “no”s, and I am taking them to heart.

The book I am currently revising begins in Oklahoma during the dust bowl and started with fears of losing the farm to foreclosure. One of the “no”s said it didn’t grab her attention, but the other was more explicit, stating that “it sounded like a very old boring story that grandparents would tell you.” I hadn’t thought of it that way at the time, but now I have images of the old silent films where a villain with a handlebar mustache is attempting to foreclose and ends up tying the farmer’s pretty daughter to a railroad track. Or maybe she is referring to the type of story where the grandparents walked five miles to school every day and it was uphill in both directions.

Based on those beta reader comments, I revised the first chapter so that the book now starts with a dust storm. The foreclosure subplot still exists but is less dominant, with more emphasis on the physical dangers from the dust storms.

That book has a female protagonist and, therefore, less appeal to boys, so I didn’t have any male beta readers. I did ask for them on the one I just got back, however, since it has a male protagonist and is intended to attract boys.

That story has Matthew and his family traveling to the California gold fields in 1850 using a route that takes them over the Isthmus of Panama. It begins on a farm in New York and, although Matthew is restless from the start, the first chapter is used primarily to set the scene. One of my male beta readers said the beginning did not make him want to keep reading “because it sounded boring to me, like more actionpacked themes.” I assume that he meant he wants more action packed into it, and I will try to do that when I revise the manuscript.

Not that I can accommodate every beta reader comment, however. The other boy who answered “no” to wanting to keep reading gave “it was sad” as the reason. Matthew’s mother and dog die before the story begins, and the farm constantly reminds him of them. That’s part of the reason he is restless, and I think the story will be weakened if I get rid of that motivation. Still, maybe I can tone the references down a bit.

One of my major concerns with that book is whether 14-year-old Matthew’s selfishness will turn off readers, and male readers in particular. I didn’t ask that specific question because I didn’t want to put it in their minds if it wasn’t already there, but I hoped that several of the questions I routinely ask would clue me in. One of those questions asks if the beta reader would want Matthew as a friend. The majority of comments said he seems nice, although one boy described him as “disloyal but nice.”

Two other routine questions can also help me discover the readers’ feelings about the protagonist’s selfishness. One asks if Matthew acted like a 14-year-old boy. One male beta reader said he acted too young, while the other readers classified him as “just right.” More telling is the question whether Matthew sounds like a real 14-year-old boy and asks for reasons. The beta reader who said he acted too young also said he didn’t act like a real 14-year-old boy, but the reader must not have felt Matthew was too far off the mark. As the comment put it, “He sounds 13 so not that big of a difference if he sounded a little more mature he’d make the cut.”

I’ll go through the next draft with an eye to making sure I’m not overdoing Matthew’s selfishness, but I was encouraged by the evaluations.

Beta readers provide valuable feedback that helps me improve my stories, so I literally thank God for them.

__________

The image at the top of this post is from the 1925 edition of Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. The illustrator was Clara Miller Burd, and the illustration is in the public domain because of its age.

A Jigsaw Puzzle World

 

Two or three weeks ago I started a jigsaw puzzle created by Bits and Pieces using a painting of the Last Supper by Ruane Manning. Unfortunately, I didn’t finish it until this Thursday, which was a week after we celebrated the event it commemorates. Nonetheless, it’s never too late to remember the Last Supper or its aftermath.

The puzzle was a fitting activity for Holy Week and the days following Easter. It also reminded me of a poem I wrote in 2022. It’s rather juvenile and will never win a prize, but the thought fits the season. So here it is for your reading pleasure.

A Jigsaw Puzzle World

The world was in pieces,

     Broken by Sin.

Then Jesus came

     To put it together again.

If you’re groaning at how bad that was, I’ll leave you with this cliché.

It’s the thought that counts.

Celebrating Easter

 

With the war in the Middle East, it’s unlikely that anyone celebrated Easter at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem this year.* In fact, its website says the tomb is closed until further notice “due to the current situation.”

Nobody knows exactly where Jesus’ body was laid after His death, and the Garden Tomb is only one of several possible sites. Still, I celebrated Easter there in 1958 and, as a seven-year-old, I thought it was an awesome experience. I’m sure it would be even more moving as an adult. So it’s too bad that nobody is celebrating there this year.

Still, it is the event, not the place, that matters.

The important thing is that Christ died for our sins and then rose again. To paraphrase Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, if He hadn’t risen, we would still be dead in our sins. Or, to put it in the words of the chorus of the hymn “This Joyful Eastertide” by George Woodward (also taken from 1 Corinthians 15):

Had Christ, who once was slain,

Not burst his three-day prison,

Our faith had been in vain;

But now has Christ arisen, arisen, arisen;

But now has Christ arisen!

 

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Alleluia!

__________

* My father took the photo at the top of this post on Easter Sunday, 1958, as we attended service at the Garden Tomb.

Pieta Art

 

Pietà means pity, and in art Pietàs depict the dead Jesus lying on His mother’s lap after being taken down from the cross. The image was first popularized by Michealangelo’s 1499 sculpture, which was created for the Vatican and still resides in Saint Peter’s Basilica there.

That’s the photo at the top of this page, which I took during a visit to the Vatican in 2018. Unfortunately, it was behind bulletproof glass because it had been vandalized in 1972. The line running through the photo is in the glass, and I couldn’t get the Pietà from the right angle without the line.

There is nothing in the Bible to support the fact that Mary held her dead Son, although it isn’t impossible. Still, I like the image because it shows Jesus’ humanity by depicting His human mother as well as His death.

Here are a few other pieces of art that depict the Pietà, starting with a painting by Giovanni Bellini around 1505.

The next two are sculptures from the 16^th Century. The first is Spanish, but the actual artist is unknown. The second was created by Ippolito Scalza in 1579 and includes two additional characters. If you look beneath Mary’s raised arm, you can see Mary Magdaline caressing Jesus’ hand and foot, and the man is Nicodemus holding the hammer, rope, and ladder used to remove Jesus from the cross.

The final photo shows a later painting done by French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau in 1876. In it, angels mourn with Mary.

As we look toward Good Friday, let us not forget that it was Jesus’ humanity that enabled Him to die for our sins.

For that, I will be forever grateful.

The Rhythms of Argentina and Uruguay

 

As mentioned last week, Roland and I began our recent South American cruise in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And what does that make you think of? The tango, of course.

On our first full day in Buenos Aires, we went to lunch and a tango show at La Ventana. We have discovered that music and dance shows on excursions are usually geared toward tourists and vary greatly in quality. This show was quite good, however. The photo at the top and the following one show some of the dancers.

Besides the dancers, the tango show included a couple who could have been in a circus because of their skills with their hands, both on drums and with swinging ropes. That’s the next two photos.

The next day we were docked in Montevideo, Uruguay, where we visited the Museo del Carnaval. Uruguay outdoes New Orleans by celebrating Carnival for 40 days. Aside from the costumes and parades, there are Murga groups presenting musical stage shows that are mostly satire on the national and world-wide political situation. We saw a show at the museum, and it was pretty interesting.  Instead of politics, however, this show was designed to explain what Murga groups are and do. That’s the final three photos.

From there, our trip concentrated more on wildlife and geography, which I covered in earlier blog posts. The entire trip was entertaining and educational, but next week I’ll leave South America and turn to another subject.

The Look of Argentina and Chile

 

Our trip took us to four countries: Argentina, Uruguay, the Falkland Islands, and Chile. I covered the Falkland Islands last week and will make a stop at Uruguay next week. However, most of our time was spent in Argentina and Chile, and this post is limited to them.

The photo at the top of this post shows both countries. Chile is very long but very narrow. From the town of Fruitillar, Chile, which is about an hour from the Pacific coast, you can look across a lake and see several volcanos. The one on the left is in Chile and the one on the right is in Argentina.

We started our cruise in Buenos Aires, which is known for its colorful buildings, especially in La Boca, which was originally a poor Italian neighborhood. The only way the residents could get paint for their houses was to use the leftovers from the ships that arrived at the port. So they might have enough blue for part of the house and use yellow or red for the rest, or maybe they would need three colors to complete the exterior. La Boca is no longer a poor neighborhood (mostly tourist shops now), but the tradition has continued.

The following photos show one of the buildings in La Boca, with a figure representing Eva Perón in the center, and the iconic pink government building where Eva used to give speeches from the balcony.

The cruise ended at Valparaiso, Chile, which had its own peculiarities. It isn’t the only city on a hill with houses built over empty space, but the sight is still fascinating. The next photo shows residences hanging from the hill.

Valparaiso is a historic city and building owners can do whatever they want to the interior but aren’t allowed to demolish or change the outside of an old building. The following photo shows a creative developer’s solution—and he apparently got away with it.

It isn’t just the buildings that are interesting, though. The scenery along the cruise route was spectacular. The next three photos were taken from our ship. The first shows the scenery we sailed by, and the following two are of the Amalia Glacier at the end of a fiord.

I’ll finish this series next week by talking about some of the entertainment we took in along the way.

 

Lions and Whales and Penguins, Oh My

 

Like last week, the title of this week’s post is a little misleading. The lions were sea lions, and the whales were merely skeletons. There were apparently live whales where we cruised, but we never saw any. We did see three species of penguins, however.

The sea lion colony was part of an excursion from Puerto Madryn, Argentina. It was mating season and we couldn’t get very close, but they were still interesting. In my letter home I called them “cute,” but they are actually quite ugly. The next two photos show the colony and as much of a close-up as I could get of the baby sea lions with my zoom lens.

There were partial whale skeletons near the sea lion viewing area, but the most complete one we saw was outside an ecocenter where the excursion took us next. That’s the skeleton in the next photo.

The whale skeleton was the only worthwhile part of the visit to the ecocenter. The main “attraction” of that part of the excursion was a very confusing lecture about the evolution of the penguin. The woman’s theses was that penguins had lost their ability to fly when adapting to environmental conditions that put them in the oceans where they had to fish for a living. She claimed the adaptation was necessary because it is anatomically impossible for any animal to both fly and hunt underwater. Of course there are birds that dive underwater to catch fish, but she said that wasn’t the same since they locate their prey from the sky or the surface and dive only long enough to pluck them out of the water, while penguins hunt underwater and stay submerged much longer than other birds. The lecturer was also adamant that in the 60 million years (I think she said) that penguins have existed on the earth, they were never able to fly. So I had trouble following her reasoning.

Although the lecture on penguins was boring, the penguins themselves were very interesting when we saw live ones in the Falkland Islands. They are very social birds that they live with their families in larger groups, although we were told that they don’t usually mingle with other types of penguins. That’s why we were lucky to see three species, including two King penguins among a group of Gentoo penguins. Here is a brief primer.

King penguins are the largest ones seen outside of Antarctica where the Emperor penguins live. King penguins have orange behind the head and yellow breasts, which is how you can pick them out of the following photo—one standing and one lying down.

Most of the penguins we saw were Gentoo penguins, which are the next largest and have orange bills and feet. Those are Gentoo penguins in the photo at the top of this post.

The other species we saw was the Magellanic penguins. I think of them as black and white, although apparently they have a small amount of pink around the eyes. Here are two photos of Magellanic penguins. The first shows the conditions we watched the various penguin species in during our morning excursion, with a cold wind and snow. The other was taken on our afternoon excursion. He looks like a loner, but that’s only when he’s out getting food for his family.

It was cold, windy, and snowing in the Falkland Islands even though it’s summer there, but it was my favorite day because I loved watching the penguins.

I enjoyed all of the wildlife we saw on our cruise, but next week I’ll tell you about some of the gorgeous landscapes.

Journey to the End of the Earth

 

Roland and I just returned from a South American cruise around the Horn. The title of this post is misleading, however, since the end of the earth would be the South Pole, or maybe there is no such thing as an end when dealing with a globe. We didn’t get near the South Pole, anyway, since we didn’t go to Antarctica.

We did, however, go literally around the Horn, which is how most people refer to Isla Hornos. As you can see from the photo of the ship tracker at the head of this post, the captain circled it with our ship. The next two photos show the mountain at the southern tip of the island, which is on the Drake Passage where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet, and a close-up (through my camera’s zoom lens) of the lighthouse. The people in the photo are from a different Viking ship on a more challenging cruise than the one we were on. 

As an aside, Isla Hornos is billed as the southernmost tip of South America, but apparently the Diego Ramierez Islands are farther south.

After going around the Horn, we docked at Ushuaia, Argentina, which bills itself as the southernmost city in the world. Again, there might be some controversy here, as the smaller Puerto Williams is farther south. However, Ushuaia has a population of approximately 180,000 while Puerto Williams’ population is less than 3,000, so it’s questionable whether Puerto Williams even qualifies as a city.

Ushuaia was originally established as an Argentinian naval base but, because of its isolated location, soon became the site for a maximum-security prison. The prison was closed in the 1940s and is now a museum. These photos show the prison and the city with the Beagle Channel in the background. The Beagle Channel was named after the ship Charles Darwin sailed on, but it has nothing to do with him. The name resulted from the Beagle’s first excursion, and Darwin didn’t join until the second.

Finishing up on the southernmost cities, we stopped at Punta Arenas, Chile, which claims the distinction of being the southernmost city on the South American mainland. (Ushuaia and Puerto Williams are both on islands.) Punta Arenas lies on the of the Straits of Magellan, and there is a large statue to the explorer in the main square. That statue is pretty traditional, however, and there are others that are more interesting. The one pictured here is the monument to the Schooner Ancud, which took possession of the Straits of Magellan for Chile in 1843. Many of the figures on it are taken from myth, which is most obvious with the mermaids on each side in the front. The other photo shows Punta Arenas from the balcony of our cabin.

So much for the southernmosts. Next week I’ll cover some of the wildlife we saw along the way.

 

Repetition Repeated

 

Repetition is a good way to memorize or remember things. In both music and literature, it can also emphasize important features, create suspense, or heighten expectation. But too much of it becomes counterproductive.

I enjoy a good hymn even though the musical structure of each stanza is the same, and that also goes for hymns that have a chorus that repeats after every verse. But part of my enjoyment comes from keying in on the elements that aren’t repetitive, such as the different words in each stanza. I don’t enjoy contemporary music that simply repeats the same words and melody over and over. Repetition that is overdone tends to lose its impact.

Literature works the same way. Some repetition can be valuable, but too much simply bores me to death.

We all have different music and reading tastes, and not everybody feels the same way about repetition. Still, every writer should be aware of the effect his or her literary devices have on the reader.

Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers is one of the most boring books I have ever read. That’s my opinion, but the reviews say that many other readers don’t agree with me.

The premise of Redeeming Love is taken from the Bible book of Hosea, which says that no one is beyond redemption. In Hosea, God tells the prophet to marry a prostitute. After she leaves him for another man, God tells Hosea to go after her and bring her back home. There is repetition in that Hosea finds and marries Gomer once and then finds her again to redeem her, but the entire book of Hosea is eleven pages in my ESV Bible and it takes less than three of them to cover the story of Hosea and Gomer. The rest is dedicated to where the story points—to God’s desire to redeem Israel and Judah.

Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love, on the other hand, takes almost 500 pages to tell the story. I realize that good Biblical fiction enhances the story to develop the characters, setting, and plot, and if the book had been 300 pages, I might have been okay with it. Unfortunately, Redeeming Love tells an extremely repetitive story about an insipid heroine who goes through the same thing over and over again and doesn’t learn her lesson until the very end.

Repetition can aid memory or highlight important lessons, but there comes a point where it becomes counterproductive. The only lesson I got from Redeeming Love is to not read anything else by Francine Rivers.

And that’s not the lesson she intended to teach.

What Did You Say?

 

Another one of my pet peeves is when a writer uses foreign terms and dialogue that doesn’t enhance the story.  

I’m not opposed to using some foreign language in a novel. In fact, my recently completed manuscript Not the Enemy uses a limited amount of German dialogue. I had two rules for using it, however. First, it was purposefully designed to enhance rather than detract from the story. Second, the reader must be able to understand the meaning without having to check with secondary sources.

In Not the Enemy, the German words and phrases are spoken by a grandmother who refuses to learn English. Their use provides insight into both the grandmother and her very American granddaughter. I was also careful to provide the necessary context clues and to limit the amount and the length of that dialogue. (Since it is a children’s book, however, I also cheated slightly by putting a glossary at the end.)

The author I’m going to use to show the wrong way to do it is probably not the best example because of the era she wrote in, but it’s the one I most recently suffered through. If it wasn’t a classic by a well-known writer, I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

I’m talking about Villette by Charlotte Brontë. The book begins in England and has an English heroine, but most of the novel is set in a fictional French-speaking European city. The story is written in the first person and is narrated mostly in English, but occasionally it includes long sections of French dialogue. Since most of the French is narrated in English, there seems to be no good reason for the occasional lapse into French.

Obviously, I don’t know Charlotte Brontë’s motivation in using so much French in Villette, so I might be misjudging her. And in her defense, in that era many of her middle- and upper-class readers would have been taught at least some French. Still, I’m sure some wouldn’t have known the language.

My experience with Villette was especially painful since I was listening to it as an audio book and it wouldn’t have been easy to simply skip over the passages. Skipping over them in the physical version wouldn’t have resolved the problem anyway, since there were few context clues and I would have wondered what I was missing.

Either way, the use of a foreign language is another device that should be used carefully to ensure that it doesn’t detract from the story.

__________

To make the graphic at the top of this page, I used Google Translate to translate “What did you say?” from English to French.

Don't Be a Show-off

 

It bothers me when authors feel the need to show off their superior knowledge. Even good ones can fall into this trap, though.

One of my holiday reads was A Christmas Party by Georgette Heyer. I enjoy her light murder mysteries when I am in the mood for something that doesn’t require much thought. So I was disappointed when I read this:

When a leaden sky heralded the advent of snow, he began to talk about old-fashioned Christmases, and to liken Lexham Manor to Dingley Dell.

In point of fact, there was no more resemblance between the two houses than between Mr. Wardle and Nathaniel Herriard.

Georgette Heyer used that as a lead-in to describe Lexham Manor, which was the setting for her story. I understood the allusion only because I had recently listened to Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers as an audio book. Since I have only read about half of Dickens’ works, I could easily have missed the reference. I image that many of Heyer’s readers would have had no idea that Dingley Dell was a country manor owned by Mr. Wardle in The Pickwick Papers. Fortunately, Heyer’s use of literary allusions was minimal and easy to overlook.

I’m not saying that a writer should never refer to something a less-well-read reader doesn’t know about. I often have my characters reading the books they would have read during their period of history, but I do it to show the characters as readers and use only the titles since the content of the book is irrelevant. Or, if it is relevant, I give the reader enough information to understand my use without having to research it.

Hidden or double meanings can even be fun at time, but allusions that some readers will miss work if—and only if—they don’t interrupt the flow and the surface story is interesting without them. Disney handles this issue well. Its animated films are filled with adult humor that children won’t get, but that doesn’t matter because the story is also told at a child’s level. If my enjoyment would depend on specialized knowledge or Mensa-level thinking, however, it isn’t the book for me.

If you want to infuse your manuscripts with allusions that show how smart you are, make sure they work on an everyday level as well.

Because it isn’t very smart to write a story nobody wants to read.

__________

The illustration at the top of this page is “Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle’s” by Hablot Knight Browne (known as Phiz) drawn for The Pickwick Papers in 1836. It is in the public domain because of its age.  

Hidden Puzzles

I enjoy books where the characters have to solve puzzles as part of the plot. This includes middle-grade children’s books such as The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, and Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library by Chris Grabenbstein. But it really annoys me when I’m expected to solve a puzzle on my own without any help from the characters.

It isn’t that I don’t like puzzles. On the contrary, putting together jigsaw puzzles and solving crosswords are among my favorite pastimes. What I don’t like is when I’m reading a book and a puzzle takes me out of the story.

I recently read The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict. The guests at a country house have been invited to solve twelve days of riddles, many of which are based on family experiences that are unknown to the reader. That means the reader can’t solve the riddles but must wait for one of the characters to announce the solution.

That’s not what annoyed me, however. No, I was annoyed by the puzzles that the author wove into the text but not the story. Looking for those answers would have been a distraction that would have ruined the book for me. Fortunately, they were hidden well enough that they didn’t create any bumps in the story, so I simply ignored them.

But I’ll never understand why an author would choose to use a device that takes readers out of the story.

 

Down with Info Dumps

 

Morocco has beautiful countryside, but the sight is marred by the litter dumped along the roads.¹ To mangle a well-known cliché, you can’t see the landscape for the trash. Information dumps in fiction work the same way, distracting you from the story.

An info dump is just what it sounds like. A writer takes everything in a character’s background and dumps it into the story all at once. It usually happens in the first chapter, but not always.

I recently finished a Christian novel by a writer who seemed to believe that info dumps were expected. Or maybe she was just too lazy to do it the right way. She isn’t well-known and you aren’t likely to read her anyway, so I won’t embarrass her by using her name.

The first chapter was dominated by an info dump about the female protagonist’s life. While most of it was important to the novel, we didn’t need to know it right away. In fact, dumping it in the first chapter took away some of the suspense the author could have used to her advantage. Both the first chapter and the book as a whole would have been much better if she had woven the background in where it fit with the story.

The second chapter, while not as bad, also contained an info dump, this time about the male protagonist’s life, and not all of it was necessary to the story. On the positive side, she did weave his trouble-making propensities as a boy in later where it fit.

If I hadn’t had other reasons for reading the book, I would have put it down after the first chapter. Or maybe I would have given her the benefit of the doubt and waited until I came across the second info dump, but I wouldn’t have finished it.

Info dumps are a good way to ruin an interesting plot. For one thing, they bore a reader who hasn’t gotten into the story yet. For another, they eliminate suspense. And they can be avoided by waiting and weaving the information into the story when it becomes necessary for the reader to know those particular facts. For example, if your character feels guilty for abandoning her children when they were young, you can show the guilt without the cause and let people know she has a secret without letting them in on it. Then, when she unexpectedly meets her daughter, the information can be gradually revealed or, if it makes for greater tension, can be revealed all at once. But you don’t have to do it in Chapter 1 if she doesn’t meet her daughter until Chapter 12.

No author does herself or himself a favor by telling too much about her characters too soon.

__________

¹ I took the photograph on a recent trip to Morocco.