I hope you all enjoyed a great start to the New Year. Mine was a bit different, with two funerals just days apart. I had the honor of speaking at the funeral of a very good friend who was once my math teacher in senior high school. He and his family remained close to ours ever since and his life was remarkable, yet humble. The second was the passing of my older sister after a long illness. There is little to link these two events, except that both deceased had been teachers and both much loved.
As I turn back to my new novel I have been struggling to link Chapter Two with Chapter Three. The third chapter is a completely different setting (underwater in a submarine) with new characters. How could I link these to help the book flow for my readers?
The answer was having both Chapter Two and Three refer to the same place—in this case, Gibraltar. The connection was obvious, yet had eluded me for quite some time. Gibraltar is pivotal to my story and it felt better to bring it forward in the novel to have it centre in the reader’s mind.