‘When An Arse Should Be An Ass…’

I could go on for days about this. Days! But I don’t have that kind of time. As my mini series on editing continues, this one is necessary only because Breathless Press is geared towards US readers.

First off; I’m British. My parents are Jamaican, but I’m the ‘least black, black person’ I know. Including my sister. Born in London, now living in the Midlands, I can’t get too much more British than that. Hell, I’ve shacked up with a Welsh guy (The Funk Master) so The Sprogs are proper Brits too. Whatever the hell that means.

Basically when I write, I write what I learned in school, which means UK spellings, grammar rules and punctuation. This hasn’t been an issue for the Meeting Each Other series. Yes, I may have confused a couple of US readers, but the conventions rules and spellings in that series are (and will continue to be) UK English.

Not so with Breathless Press.

My first round of edits was to change all the little niggles from what I know, to what US readers will know.
Trousers = Pants
Mobile phone (mobile) = Cell phone (cell)
Flat = Apartment
Fringe = Bangs (I’ll never get over that one)

And then it was getting onto the spellings. *shakes head*
Colour = Color
Arse = ass (I had to change quite a few of those! – lot of arses/asses in this novella)
Favourite = Favorite

And so on. And that’s before I got anywhere near the actual content of the piece. Oh and little things like this:
Towards = Toward

I felt like this a lot. A LOT. But at the end of the day my editor is in the biz because she knows what she’s doing. She knows the market. She knows the rules.

Basically. Every time I wanted to question something I had to ask myself this: ‘Do I really disagree with this, or is it just a knee-jerk response to being questioned at all?’ That question was often, very quickly followed by: ‘Do you know as well as she does?’ The answer was often ‘no’ (unless it was about character development, arc or plot – that’s my bit…most of the time).

What I didn’t count on, however, was the sheer number of differences. Things I never think twice about when I’m watching a movie (and when did I start saying ‘movie’ instead of ‘film’?), have suddenly become important. Check this out:

Credit: Anglotopia.com

In conversation, I doubt these things would cause too much of a misunderstanding if a person were to use one word or the other, but isn’t it interesting how English as a language has evolved in such different ways?

Okay. To round up, one for the film buffs. 😉