Welcome to author JL Merrow who is joining us today to talk about her new release “Midnight in Berlin”.
Check out JL her guestpost, answer the question and have a shot on winning the giveaway by commenting on this post 🙂
Welcome JL 🙂
Hi, I’m JL Merrow, and I’m delighted to be here today as part of the blog tour to celebrate the release of Midnight in Berlin, my second MM werewolf romance.
It’s fair to say that most of my books, like their author, are as English as cream teas, punting on the Cam, and EastEnders*. I use British vernacular, sometimes to the extent that reviewers say they had to use Google to look up a word or phrase. My heroes come from many walks of life, from academia to pest control, and may have different ethnicities, but they have one thing in common: they’re Brits, and they speak the Queen’s English (or the Queen Vic**’s, or something in between***.)
So why write a book with an American narrator? Isn’t that just making life hard for myself? The US/UK language divide has a lot of pesky little snares and pitfalls lying in wait for the unwary author. I know it drives me mad when a supposedly British character starts talking about blocks and sidewalks, so I can only assume it’s the same for those of a transatlantic persuasion when a US character uses vest to mean undershirt and pants to mean underwear.
You say elevator; we say lift. You say arugula; we say rocket. You say potayto; we say…actually, we say potayto too. Does anyone in the world actually say potahto?
Moving on… The reason I wrote Leon as an American was simple: I wanted to explore a character as unlike me as possible. I am, as has been noted elsewhere, painfully British, albeit with the shocking aberration of an incurable dislike for tea. Not that Brits and Americans are polar opposites, of course. But I think it’d be fair to say Leon’s a lot louder and better at putting up a confident front than I am and somehow, when I wrote him, he spoke to me with a US accent.
And then I hedged my bets by giving him a backstory that included some time spent in Britain. Just in case he’d accidentally picked up a British phrase or two! 😉
*British soap set in working-class East London
**The Queen Victoria, iconic pub in EastEnders, scene of many an assault, murder, arson attempt and/or slanging match. Sample phrases: “Leave it aht!”; “’E ain’t worth it!” and the classic, “You slag!”
***They’re also mostly southerners, too. I was born and raised on a part of Britain so far south it actually drifted a few miles out to sea and became the Isle of Wight, sometime between 7,000 and 125,000 years ago**** (depending on which internet site you believe).
****That’s when the drifting occurred, not my birth. I am not quite that old.
I really can’t get my head around a jumper being a pinafore dress in the US, whereas it’s a woolly sweater in the UK. And my Australian friend constantly confuses me with talk of op-shops and Salvos. What’s your worst example of language divide?
I’m offering a prize of a $10 Dreamspinner Press gift certificate to one lucky commenter on the tour, who will be randomly chosen on Sunday 2nd September. Good luck!
Midnight in Berlin
One bad decision can change your life forever
It’s midnight in Berlin, and drifter Leon is hitchhiking home in the rain, covered in feathers after a wild festival in the city park. He can’t believe his luck when he’s picked up by a hot guy in a Porsche. That is, until he realises his driver is a creature from his worst nightmares—and plans to turn him into one too. He runs, but he can’t escape the werewolf’s bite.
Christoph made one mistake, but he’s paying for it plenty. He took Leon for a rogue werewolf on his way home from a hunt, and by the time he realises the truth it’s too late to do anything but make Leon a monster to save his life. That doesn’t save Christoph from the pack leader’s harsh punishment.
As Leon struggles to cope with his horrifying new reality—and his mixed feelings for the man who bit him—he’s desperate to discover not only what’s happened to Christoph, but the secrets their pack leader is hiding from them all.
Secrets the pack will kill to protect.
Available in ebook and paperback from Dreamspinner Press
Midnight in Berlin was previously published by Samhain, but has been completely re-edited and given a lovely new cover for this second edition by Dreamspinner Press.
JL Merrow is that rare beast, an English person who refuses to drink tea. She read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where she learned many things, chief amongst which was that she never wanted to see the inside of a lab ever again.
She writes (mostly) contemporary gay romance and mysteries, and is frequently accused of humour. Two of her novels have won Rainbow Awards for Romantic Comedy (Slam!, 2013 and Spun!, 2017) and several of her books have been EPIC Awards finalists, including Muscling Through, Relief Valve (the Plumber’s Mate Mysteries) and To Love a Traitor.
JL Merrow is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, International Thriller Writers, Verulam Writers and the UK GLBTQ Fiction Meet organising team.
Find JL Merrow online at: https://jlmerrow.com/, on Twitter as @jlmerrow, and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/jl.merrow
English is noy mt first language so I sometimes I don’t recognize right away the author’s origins. But I do agree it becomes a lot of work (for the author) if they write from a different place from where they are.
Lol – yes, there must be even more pitfalls when translating into an entirely different language! 🙂
Congrats, sounds like a good one. And I appreciated your thoughts on the Brits vs. Americans.
Thank you! 😀
Same as Serena, English is not my first language that I’m not quick to notice the difference. It’s easier to catch them verbally though, how same word pronounced differently. For different usage of words to express an object, my go-to is either e-reader dictionary or google, lol.
I love the dictionary feature on my e-reader – saves so much time and effort! 😀
It’s not so much my story, but I had a friend who lived in the UK for several years. When she had to give her mother’s maiden name when dealing with banks or whatnot, she always had trouble because the name had two Zs in it, near the beginning and end. If she remembered one “zed,” she’d forget the next one–“Zee! I mean, zed!”–and have to start over.
Yes, what is it with the zee/zed divide? *googles* Hah! zed is the original form, and therefore clearly better. 😉 Although I quite like the idea of “izzard”: http://mentalfloss.com/article/62639/why-it-zed-britain-and-zee-america
I’m Canadian and even we have a language divide with the US. Pencil crayons are colored pencils. KD is short for Kraft Dinner, which is how they marketed mac and cheese here. Every time someone talks about a beanie or knitted hat, I want to tell them that it’s a toque (which is like ‘took’ with the same vowel sound of ‘new’). The one that gets me with the UK is the whole pants/jumper thing.
No, no. A toque is a posh French hat, and you pronounce it “tock”!
And there’s no “and” in macaroni cheese. 😉
But yes, the clothes ones are the worst! Although oddly, my dad (who is roughly as old as the colonies, and British through and through) has always said “pants” to mean trousers. I have no idea what’s going on there!
Thank you for the post. It is strange how accents work… I am from the north of Spain, everybody says that we do not talk, we sing (LOL, even when I was in Ireland people kept asking me why my accent was so different from the rest of the Spaniards there….) Anyway, I cannot understand people from the South of the country. Their accent is weird, I get lost trying to understand what they are talking about most of the times….
Heh, I’m from the south of England, and what you say puts me in mind of the time I first heard a Glaswegian talk – I couldn’t understand a single word! And I love that description of your accent as “singing”. 😀
congrats on the re-release
as an Aussie I get confused with word choices as well lol
Heh, I have an Aussie friend and she’s constantly confusing me! 😀
We got to spend a week in Canada this summer! It was so great. Me met people from all over the world while we were there…China, Italy, England, Sweden, Croatia to name a few. I love hearing accents and talking with people about our crazy politics. Some ideas cross vocabularies and geographical boundaries!
I’m very envious – Canada is one of the places I’d love to go to! I’d like to take a rail trip across the country. The scenery looks amazing. 🙂
What a great cover. I hope to read this one soon.
Thank you!
Great cover! Congrats on the new book!
Thanks!
Ehm, I live in Indonesia — we have so many ‘regional’ languages. I only speak my national language, and although it’s close to Malay (which is used in Malaysia or SIngapore) doesn’t mean that I can understand their speak easily.
For example — kereta in Indonesia means TRAIN while in Malaysia means CAR. But it’s written the same and sound the same *lol*
Okay, that sounds really confusing – at least if the meanings were wildly different you’d be able to rely on context!