Celtic Vibe, by Catriona

What are your thoughts on writing ‘outside your own experience’? What are the potential pitfalls? What are the reasons to do it? Can you give a personal example of how you navigated this potentially problematic terrain?

The blog title is why I can't watch Outlander. If you're from Sheridan, Wyoming, I'm sure the carnival of accents with a general Celtic vibe seem like Scottish authenticity second to none. Me? Made it through half an episode. But I've got no problem with the blanket "Northern" in my beloved Coronation Street. (I bet people from Salford have to watch with a large gin.)

But that's not writing.

Similar things happen when people write wayyyyy outside their own experience too though. If - and this is crucial, kind of if with two Fs - they don't ask someone to check for bloopers. I've given up on countless US-written, UK-set books where the author didn't know and didn't check. In fact, couldn't check. Because they didn't know what they didn't know, Donald Rumsfeld style. 

For instance, there was a scene set at an out-door fundraiser for an English MP. The writer knew that a senator/congressperson was called an MP - cool. But didn't know that electoral finance law in the UK is such that fundraising kind of doesn't happen. And if it did, it wouldn't happen outside. Because it's raining.

That same book had a passage where a person with a medical problem asked a doctor if they "took NHS". That's when I shut the covers and passed the copy along to someone whose teeth wouldn't grind so hard that American dentistry couldn't save them.

It was such a fundamental misunderstanding of what the National Health Service is and how it functions. Oh, my beloved NHS!

It's in my mind for two reasons. One, the second book in my new 1940s series, set in Edinburgh at the birth of the service, comes out later this month in the US. Yay!

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But also I clattered over and broke my kneecap on Friday. Less yay! 

It wasn't my first brush with US health norms in all their glory since I got here. (I broke my wrist ten years ago.) But I'd forgotten. It was when one of the ambulance paramedics who strapped me to the gurney said "Which hospital do you want to go to?" that I remembered. 

Which hospital did I want to go to? I. Don't. Care. I. Don't. Want (can't keep this up!) to have to care. I don't want to live somewhere where all the hospitals aren't exactly the same, i.e. just fine. Last time round, when a bone doc said he'd be happy to let the surgeon he was sending me to, operate on him, he probably thought he was being reassuring. What I heard was "There are surgeons around that I wouldn't let operate on me". Eek!

It's hard to explain this to people here. My best attempt is to say: imagine your house was on fire and you were scrabbling around for the paperwork to show that you were approved for firefighters to put it out, and the 911 operator asked you which fire station you wanted to use, and your friends recommended Sizzling Puddle Firehouse and warned you against Blackened Ashes Firehouse, because they haven't got any buckets. Then the red truck came up your drive and someone in a yellow hat and big boots jumped down . . . and asked you for your credit card.

But then trying to explain to people back home why people here don't understand the NHS, the best I've come up with is: you go to what looks like a supermarket and stroll around - fresh produce, bakery, fish counter (ooh the salmon looks nice), some teabags, milk, yoghurt, cat food, any new jigsaw puzzles in that bin - yes!, shampoo, bag of posh bagels . . . and you start to look for the check-out. You ask a nice lady in a uniform. She says "Sorry? Check-out? What do you mean?" You explain that you want to pay. "Pay for what?" she asks, looking around, puzzled. "Well, this," you say, pointing at the pile of salmon and bagels and all that. "Why would you pay me for your food?" she asks, hoping you're okay because it's nearly the end of her shift and she wants to go home.

Then you stroll right out into the car park to leave, wondering what on earth just happened and how this society functions and where the catch is because surely if this was possible everywhere would do it.

It was forty-four years of that system that I missed on Friday teatime. I just wanted a free ambulance to take me to the nearest ER where all my medical records since the day I was born were available to anyone who looked. Then, after some free x-rays, a free ER doc would call a free ortho doc and I'd be given a free knee-immobilising brace, quite possibly a free wheelchair, definitely some free painkillers and sent home, with an appointment for some free surgery in the next couple of days at the nearest free hospital, more than likely the same one I was in on Friday, where I'd also be going for free physiotherapy in six weeks' time. And I'd have got a cup of tea.

Does that seem like much to ask? Don't answer!

Cx