This is something I struggle with, especially when I’m writing a historical. My typically breezy rom-com voice tends to intrude and it makes the story jerky. I just finished — and yes, I actually finished it because I wanted to find out what happened — a book where the author couldn’t seem to decide between contemporary slang and the frou-frou language of her fantasy otherworld. The characters would say something like ‘you have seen to me so pleasurably’ in one sentence, then in the next, it would talk about kicking her legs apart like a cop frisking a suspect.

Umm. That just doesn’t work for me. And it was a valuable lesson to see it all laid out so plainly. Makes me watchful of the language I use.

The nice thing about the Steampunk is that even though it’s set just before the turn of the century, it takes place in the American West and I can be a lot more casual with my language than I could in, say, my straight Victorian historical romance.

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