A few days ago I finished writing my first book in English - "Angel in chains", book one in the "Forever yours" series. It has been an interesting journey and definitely not an easy one. I've always been interest in other languages and once I discovered self-publishing it became obvious that things would be easier if I wrote in English. By now I have published two books, both in Swedish, and some time after the second was published I decided to write only in English. Until than I planned to write in both Swedish and English, but that would be too much work.
During this last year I've been preparing myself as much as possible. I started to read A LOT of books in English, to learn how writing rules work and so on. I think I read about 60 books or more. I discovered early that the writing rules were different from the Swedish, so it felt like going back to school again. (I did spend an entire year in Writing School to learn how to write in Swedish, but I've also spent a life time studying the art of writing.)
Here's one example for you, for instance how differently comma and quotes are used.
English: “Please,
tell me,” she said.
Swedish: "Please, tell me", she said.
This simple little thing took a while to get used to. I even had to re-program my keyboard since the English quotes were nowhere to find on it.
Everything went a lot slower than I had expected, but at the same time it wasn't that surprising. I had never written anything in English when I decided to write my first book in English, but after a few chapters I started to get a hang of it.
I know I still have a lot to learn, but I'm sure that with each book things will run more smoothly. Right now I'm in the middle of proofreading "Angel in chains" and hopefully the book will go well with the English readers. :)
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