Last year for St. Patrick’s Day, we dispelled some Irish myths. I learned a lot about modern Irish culture as I wrote about Irish characters. Once, they even got to be the villains—and that’s what we get to see today as part of The St. Patrick’s Day Blogfest hosted by Colene and Alexia!

In this (never ever edited and heavily compressed) excerpt, Mark is trying to find the bomb Grace and Pearse have planted on a St. Patrick’s Day parade float the night before the parade. Mark has been investigating them separately for a while, using different cover IDs with each of them (one of which is Southern).

That’s about to come back to bite him.

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They could kill hundreds of people tomorrow. Thousands.

O the second row of parade floats, Mark saw a pile of clutter in the pristine warehouse. If he found the bomb, the bomb squad could be here by the time he finished his sweep. It’d take two minutes to check. It was only a small risk.

He jogged to the toolbox and tools. They were definitely coming back. He glanced at the float. Along the bottom edge, clothespins held a few inches of long green fringe around a small, white translucent plastic cube.

They’d started installing it. Mark jammed his gun into his waistband, grabbed a flashlight from the toolbox and slid beneath the float. The wires hung there, exposed. He could end it now.

He crept from under the float, but before he moved, Mark heard a gasp behind him. He drew his gun, but a flashlight blinded him.

“Jason?” Grace.

A less experienced operative would’ve broken cover and confessed all. A better operative would play his cover even harder. “Grace, what are you doin here?”

“I should be askin’ you the same thing.”

“What’s this, then?” A man’s voice rang out behind him—Irish accent, familiar.

Pearse? Mark turned around and was again blinded by a flashlight.

“Jimmy?” Definitely Pearse.

“Now, y’all, let’s don’t go jumpin—” A blow to the back of his head cut Mark off mid-sentence.

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And it gets worse. Hooray!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

I heart languages. I majored in Linguistics in college, and as part of that I studied two foreign languages. I’m super excited that my library offers free online language courses (and am frustrated that they don’t use more technical terminology. I want to conjugate, darn it!). I transcribe things into the International Phonetic Alphabet. For fun.

But it wasn’t on a conscious level that I began using characters who spoke other languages in my works. I started with a native English speaker—but a native Irish English speaker.

This might actually be trickier than using a foreign language, because it’s easy to forget all the subtle differences between American and Commonwealth English. I mean, I speak English, how hard could it be, right? (Not as easy as you think.)

I think my next project will feature a character who speaks Russian as her native language. This will have more challenges for me because I want to learn all I can about the language to make her voice (in English) more authentic.

For example, in Russian, you can reorder the phrases of a sentence without changing the meaning. “To the store I went” and “I went to the store” are both perfectly acceptable. Moving a phrase to the beginning of the sentence adds emphasis. (So “To the store I went” is like saying “[No,] I went to the store.”)

Which brings me to a dilemma: in English (or just in “good writing”), we tend place emphasis on things at the end of sentences. So what do you think? Should I use the Russian emphasis pattern to stay truer to the way my character would think, or should I conform to the writing standards of English?

And if you have any questions about any of your foreign (or not-so-foreign) characters’ use of language, feel free to ask me!

More fun facts about language and meaning this week from Livia Blackburne

Photo by Eric Andresen