twovictorianladies

Even after spending four fifths of my life in the US, my time in Canada still affects me. My brother once commented that he’s too American to be fully comfortable in England, but too Canadian to be fully comfortable in the US, and that about sums it up. There’s still something deep in me that nestles down happily every time my plane lands in Calgary or Toronto, or I drive across the Ambassador Bridge, or get off the ferry in Nova Scotia and whispers, “I’m home!”

And of course, England has always been my spiritual home. Large portions of my writing takes place there, though for different reasons. The historical novels take place there because for plot reasons I needed an older landscape than can be found in the US. The second of my mysteries has a big section that takes place there because, again for plot reasons, my characters need to be doing some distant travel and that’s the “distant” locale I’m most comfortable with.

But the mainstream fiction was written specifically to deal with my realization that I’m still, even after all this time, experiencing a form of culture shock. I frequently don’t even know if I’m using American, Canadian, or English idiom, for example. A dear friend is British and when I talk to her, I find myself homesick. My intent was to write a story about culture shock; about a British girl coming to the US and attempting to deal with the different lifestyle. I really wanted to address this situation, particularly since so few people really understand that Canada and the US do not share the same culture, even though we share a common border many thousand miles long, and more or less share a language. (They mostly understand that England and the US do not.)

But while I managed to get some of that into the story, I ended up writing a very different book than I intended. A different character took over and insisted that I write about him, too. Instead of her story, it became their story. And leaving him out would have been problematic, since the story itself wanted him there.

So when I next pick that series up I’m going to try again. No doubt the book will have its own ideas and steer me in a different direction, but sooner or later, I’ll get the book written that I really want to write.  The book rules!