I have always used English in my day job, as English is the language of technology and business, a sort of Esperanto that everybody knows just enough to get along.  For many years I wrote my stories mostly using my mother tongue - Italian. But when I discovered that some characters were speaking English in my mind, I decided that it was not a good idea to translate all those things back into Italian. 

In 2006 my "day job" brought me to Brussels, a multilingual and multicultural city where you can hear the most bizarre languages. And English is the only language that everybody pretends to understand, whether you are a Belgian citizen of French or Dutch mother tongue, a European expat speaking any of the 24 official languages of the EU, or an immigrant from Magreb, Pakistan, India, Ukraine - actually, anywhere in the world. So, the stories that came to my mind in Brussels had to be written in English - no way to make a different choice, because English is the language you hear in the metro, at the train station, in the shops. English is even the language used by the government when they cannot decide if something should be written in French or in Dutch, and if they do this, who am I to contradict a democratically-elected government?

Of course, the language may sound funny. Imagine hearing the "ze" of the French, the hard consonants of the Germans, the exaggerated "r" of the Spaniards, and the unintelligible sounds of the Indians. What you hear in Brussels is a distant relative of the good English language. You could name it "international English", but I would rather say that I write in "Brussels English".