It’s been almost 15 years since I immigrated from South Africa to Australia and began writing romance. In that time, I’ve published 30 books…and struggled with every one of them. It turns out the English language isn’t quite so simple as I once believed. You see, I grew up learning South African English, but I write Australian romance for American Publishers. Which means I’ve had to forget my 12 years of basic schooling, learn American spelling (color, not colour), while writing Australian lingo. Simple? Yeah, not really. Okay, not at all. Every day wording and expressions can get downright confusing. No matter how hard I try to write in Australian English, South Africanisms seem to creep in all the time. My characters often greet one another with “howzit, boet” instead of “g’day, mate”, and it’s only in re-reads or edits that I (or my editor) will pick up the error. The simple exercise of a character walking beside the road perplexes me. In South Africa, said character would walk along the pavement. In Australia, she or he would be on the footpath, but in America, it’s called a sidewalk. So please, someone tell me – where should my character walk?…