I thought readers might find interesting the rationale behind my writing of “Worlds Apart” so I’ve put together a few thoughts that were very prevalent at that time.

I learned so much in our first few months of living in Maryland (during which time I wrote this story), not least of all that we are all so different, so exciting, so worth getting to know.  I realised “ordinary and mundane’ can easily be tweaked to become interesting with any story. I used very simple differences to enhance my story’s setting and believe it worked tremendously well.

While living in Ellicott City MD I soon realised I was in the ideal position to add some extra colour to the story floating around inside my head. I would land my New Zealand heroine smack into the middle of an emotional crisis in a foreign country. She would quickly discover television and movies didn’t prepare her for the differences which exist. The cultures and language of USA would confound her as much as it did myself and my family when we shifted there for a two year sojourn.

Both countries speak English as their first language, don’t they? Both countries have relatively well developed societies. Over half our television and movie experiences come from US. We’ll be sweet, as New Zealanders, settling into this country would be a piece of cake. Basic. No worries.

Wrong!

Thank goodness my husband’s attachment to the NZ Embassy meant we had contact with other Kiwis who had weathered the transition because we floundered. We discovered we spoke Kiwi and “they’ spoke American. They had strange customs to get our heads around. Unlike at home every shop didn’t have an Eftpost machine. Without a social security number to quote simple things like getting power, cable, phone accounts became a nightmare. It was initially impossible to buy a cell phone.  Despite the rocky beginning my family loved every minute we resided in MD. We did the most incredible things and met the most amazing people there. We wished we could have stayed longer.

I loved incorporating the differences we found into my story. A lot of those differences couldn’t be included because of the story line but I tried to squeeze in enough to give an added source of tension between my hero and heroine. I think it worked pretty well. Then when I started working with my editor at The Wild Rose Press, Maggie suggested we utilise the spelling differences between the two countries as well. That caused a lot of fun. If you’re reading the story, you’ll find when you are in the heroine’s head, NZ spelling/language is used, while when the hero takes over, American spelling prevails. We did wonder if this would be obvious to the reader ““ I’d love to hear from anyone who read “Worlds Apart” ““ did you pick up on these changes with POV? And understand their significance?