GUEST POST: A Canuck Among Yankees by Megan Crewe
Siri here. I’m excited to introduce our first guest blogger for 2012, Megan Crewe. Megan is, as of today, the author of two published YA novels. She’s also a cat lover, a critiquing guru, a kung fu fighter (yes, really), and a Torontonian (like me). Like Megan, many Canadian authors’ primary market is the United States, but that can lead to a culture clash. Here she is to explain… — Growing up next to the US, watching American TV shows and movies and reading American books, I saw their stories and Canadian stories as being pretty much the same. Sure, I changed my “centre”s to “center”s and “colour”s to “color”s when submitting a story to a US magazine or anthology–to make it easier for the editors, who’d have to do it anyway if the piece was accepted. It was only when I started publishing novels with American publishers that I realized how many little cultural and linguistic differences there are, as my Canadian foibles were corrected in copyedits. Where I’d say “grade ten,” Americans say “tenth grade.” I use “washroom” interchangeably with “bathroom,” but to most Americans it sounds old-fashioned. And everything from high school classes to the health care system works differently.