What details? ~ by Maressa Mortimer

We arrived in the Netherlands early Saturday morning, after an absence of nearly two years. My kids were thrilled, so was I, although dropping the puppy off back with her mother was rather hard...

We found one of our favourite places for breakfast, and we all had our favourite drinks. It’s all about favourites when we get to the Netherlands. My kids discuss these at length before we’ve even packed the first few socks and shirts. It starts with what to have on the boat, before disembarkation. Mummy will have coffee, of course, and they will have a strawberry milkshake.

After our wonderful breakfast, we went to the holiday place we own, dropped off a few things, then straight to the supermarket. That is where things started to get interesting. We hadn’t had Dutch food for two years, but none of it had been forgotten. So as soon as we walked in, all six of us spotted things we loved.

We went around the supermarket, my four kids getting more and more excited as well as more dysregulated as too many choices had to be made. We wandered through each aisle, looking for coffee, liquorice, special apple syrup and tinned soup. The trolley was well organised this time, as my husband rearranged shopping carefully, and the packing was done easily as well. Such a successful trip.

Till my parents arrived, and we offered drinks. Of course you can have tea. Ah, we didn’t actually buy any tea. But some was found in a corner cupboard. Setting the table for our evening tea, it turned out we didn’t buy any marg or butter either. Hubby solved it by walking to the on-site shop.

It made me think of writing, as butter/marg is used a lot in our family. Why didn’t I get some? It’s the small details that count, and larger ones count even more. When writing, some of the mistakes my editor corrects are glaringly obvious. When I see her red pen marks, I cringe, as I can’t believe I chose that word. And why would I put an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence? What kind of writer does that?

Some writing mistakes are like margarine, underlying issues. So mundane that you forget. Some might be more like tea, important and hard to replace quickly. In Burrowed, I thought of reusing the road surface, as I grew up with that kind of thing. I used tarmac, which I thought was the English word for the same thing, but it turns out the correct word was asphalt. Fortunately, my editor knew tarmac couldn’t be recycled, at least not like I saw asphalt being melted and poured back onto the roads.

Too much detail could be a problem too. Not enough coverage to keep details out of sight, although in our case, there was no danger of not having enough sandwich toppings. Savoury toppings were outnumbered by sweet toppings though, so we didn’t use all the toppings. Too much sweet stuff, especially in the evening, will backfire badly. In fact, a sandwich with just margarine would probably have been best. But who wants to read a book where the largest part is the underlying details?

Maressa Mortimer is Dutch but lives in the beautiful Cotswolds, England with her husband and four (adopted) children. Maressa is a homeschool mum as well as a pastor’s wife, so her writing has to be done in the evening when peace and quiet descend on the house once more. She loves writing Christian fiction, as it’s a great way to explore faith in daily life. Because of her interest in writing, Maressa is part of Creativity Matters: Find Your Passion For Writing, an anthology encouraging people to write.

Her debut novel, Sapphire Beach, was published in December 2019, and her first self published novel, Walled City, came out in December 2020, followed by Viking Ferry, a novella. Beyond the Hills is the second book in the Elabi Chronicles, and was released in 2021, followed by stand-alone novel Burrowed, released in 2022. All of Maressa’s books are available from her website, www.vicarioushome.com, Amazon or local bookshops.