It's the narrative voice. Consistency is important-- but I suspect (I'm just re-reading) that the narrative voice slipped to become a little more British the moment Victoria entered the scene, because it started telling things from almost-her-POV. Hum. It may not just be that word I need to change...

Cereal:

Yes. This. One of the things I like about switching viewpoints from scene to scene is that it gives me a chance to write for extended lengths of time in different voices.

That's how I ended up writing diary entries. I was trying to make this fic be more of a piece, with one voice. Although-- as I've just noticed-- the voice is sort of changing through it. Dammit.

I was once ripped out of an otherwise interesting YA fantasy novel (it may have been one of Diane Duane's; I'm not sure) because an American character was trying to make up her mind whether she fancied a particular boy, or only liked him, since Americans never use fancy in that sense.

OTOH, I use American spellings in my English-set novel because that seems to be standard practice when writing for American publication. And I use "gotten," because given that we're still using it here, I'm guessing its disappearance from British English is relatively recent, and therefore that my characters would use it in 1810.

The lack of gotten on your side of the pond does throw me, as using just "got" here seems to only be something I hear in low company.

If that makes sense. (I had a Brit beta miss a gotten once... I think it's still in there... keep meaning to remove the thing.)

I get slightly thrown, actually, by some UK writers when they do Giles, Ethan, or Wes, because while they sound like *real* English people, they don't sound like their show selves.

I get slightly thrown, actually, by some UK writers when they do Giles, Ethan, or Wes, because while they sound like *real* English people, they don't sound like their show selves.

That's a good point--the UK/US/Canadian divide is less important than getting the overall sound of a character's thoughts. Ray K. and Frank Pembleton are both U.S.ian characters, for example, but the way they use language is vastly different.

I get thrown out of a narrative if the setting is the US or the UK and the writer uses terms from somewhere else.

Things like "car park" vs "parking log" or "mobile" vs "cell phone". Other people might not have a problem with it if a writer is trying to create a believeable world then they should recreate the correct terms. Reading the wrong term throws me into the wrong place.

It just takes that extra bit of mental energy to say to oneself, "Oh, I'll read that as 'truck by the elevator'." And god knows, I have little enough mental energy to spare. Everytime I'm forced to translate Brit to Mur'can my kidneys shut down and I can't remember what my mother looks like.

I don't think that mixing UK/US usage is a hanging offense. In many cases, the author simply may not realize that "flat" is a UK term while "apartment" is the US term.

If the story is otherwise good and worth reading, I would be inclined to send a feedback note praising the story and pointing out that oh, by the way, Character X (an American) would use the word "apartment" instead of "flat."

Getting character's voices true is very difficult-- I know, for example, that my Spike suffers because he gets more like my voice and less like his own show voice. And I also know (another example from this fic) that the Draco in my head would never say "off of"-- it's entirely too plebian-- but this author thinks differently.

Huh. Well, the fact is, language moves and changes. I don't use jumper to mean sweater, but I would use flat to mean apartment (and do). Unless it's actually confusing or really stands out (as with a man in a pregnant-looking dress), I shouldn't think it's that big an issue.

Or, I suppose, there's an absolute threshold below which dialect and variant vocabulary are not noticeable to me, and then above that threshold it's a game of "cosmopolitan, ignorant, or trying too hard?"

Whereas more than 2-3 words in a foreign language automatically qualify as "trying too hard", for me, and that goes double on TV, and that goes triple when the TV actors don't actually speak that language. (Bad Firefly! Alias gets a pass only because (a) Vaughn is French and (b) they sometimes use subtitles.) Foreign words with translation -- trying too hard but at least concerned about the reader; foreign words without translation -- probably the author is being snotty. Heaven knows, I have been snotty, but that does nto stop me from hating it in other people.