About My Co-Author
Lily Marie

Writing a series of books definitely has its challenges. Making it compelling, rounding out the characters, following a timeline, and all the other fun factors that comes with it. But, add into the mix a pandemic, your sister and nieces moving into your small house during a nationwide lockdown, homeschooling said munchkins, and everything just gets even more complicated. 

 

But none of these come close to the complexities of writing with an American! Hear me out here... 

 

We speak the same language - English obviously - but do we write the same? No, we really don’t! 

 

Those subtle differences in accents and culture, between us, bring different flavours to the mix. Sorry, I mean flavors . . . See what I mean? 

 

Did you know we put commas in different places? Literally, grammatical non negotiables that have been drummed into me since school, obliterated.  Don’t even get me started on the Oxford comma and how much I hate it, but I mentioned that once to Tag, my writing partner, and it was as if I had personally offended her and her entire family. 

 

Another great example of the struggles we had was when simple everyday sayings were very subtly different. I remember once where Tag had written ‘he couldn’t get a word in edgewise’ whereas we say ‘edgeways’.  We went back and forth editing it when the other ‘corrected’ it, until we realised it was a language difference. 

 

Another one which looks totally wrong to my British eyes is ‘then and there’ instead of ‘there and then’. I know It’s such a small difference , but when you’re used to saying it one particular way, it sounds so wrong to your ears to say it any other way. 

 

And don't even get me started on the days and days we spent arguing over what to call the type of pasta used in Beef Stroganoff. Tag INSISTED it had to be served on a bed of noodles, but for us ‘noodles’ are something in an asian stir fry. That type of pasta is called spaghetti. Apparently, though, none of our American readers would have understood what we were talking about so that too had to be changed. You people don’t even eat the same foods we do (mmm beans on toast.)

 

And then there were times I had to Google a word because I hadn’t heard it before, or it wasn’t used in the same context. Slang phrases, especially those from past eras, are difficult to translate from American to British. But when you’re writing a time-travelling story, those slang phrases come up more often than you’d expect and cause ongoing editing discussions. 

 

Eventually I realised that I needed to Americanise my writing to make our lives easier. Especially as we couldn’t mix the two writing styles together, it just wouldn’t work. Plus, the main characters in our stories were Americans, albeit living in London, so it made sense to let them speak in a more American way. So we had to push through to write ‘as one’ and that meant me having to learn to speak ‘American’. 

 

Even beyond the inherent language difficulties, this story is heavy on dialogue, with a lot of those passages involving British or Irish dialects. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to figure out how ‘dialect-y’ to make a sentence while also negotiating how to Americanise a cockney rhyming slang phrase or an Irish accent. Writing accents is hard enough, especially when you’re writing characters from fifty or so years ago - you have to balance making it ‘sound’ authentic without overloading the readers by including too much odd phrasing, strange grammar, and nonsensical abbreviations - all while still making it comprehensible to American readers. Now THAT was a real challenge. 

 

I wasn’t the only one that had to change how they wrote. Tag also had to attempt to write for some of our British characters and I would have to go in and try and decipher what she was trying to say - and, I admit, I would picture her reading out the characters words as she wrote in a delightful Dick Van Dyke style accent.

 

Hopefully, we managed to reach some kind of happy middle ground in our story, though. 

 

Another obstacle that got in our way from time to time was that the two of us were living in completely different time zones. A huge eight hour time difference sometimes meant the flow stopped flowing... then flowed again when one of us woke up. Luckily I keep rather unsociable hours, but there’s nothing like pitching a brilliant idea that you can’t wait to share with your partner, and then having to wait hours upon hours to see if they think it’s as exciting as you believe it to be. 

 

Overall, this has been an incredible experience. I’ve always been a storyteller and loved everything America, so writing as an American has been an honour... honor? 

 

We’ve loved creating these characters and taking this journey with them… As well as with each other. My ‘American’ is coming along nicely, I think. And next time I visit the States, I bet I can navigate the language even better than before. Or not. But it’s still been fun exploring all those differences.