I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.

But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.

She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma - that repetition - maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.

Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.

We have no home, she told me. I am your home.

Always tell us where we are. And don't just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they're great at this.