Just a short note on my observations. After getting various reviews from American readers that the stuff I'd written was full of "grammatical" and "syntax" errors, I took a close look. Notice they didn't say "spelling" errors. But when I looked, I couldn't find any errors of grammar. I even ran the text through Word's grammar checker and that picks us some weird and wonderful things, but not here.
Kinder reviewers were pointing out that the author was British and that his use of English would differ from what Americans are used to.
I guess that because of movies like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, many Americans are very used to standard British English in its spoken form. And when I've been in the States apart from a very few times, I don't have a problem being understood. When people say "Excuse me?" in the USA they mean "I didn't hear / understand what you said," not "please get out of my way" like it normally means in British English where "I didn't hear/understand what you said," is normally "Pardon?"
Despite their familiarity with spoken British English, I made the mistake of presuming that the average reader (not the New York Anglophile who only reads the work of Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon) is familiar with British spelling, at least to the extent that they would go "Ah! That's the British spelling." But no, they just think it's wrong.
So now I write color and harbor and realize and sympathize and I smolder rather than smoulder. British readers readily recognize the American spelling (see what I did there?) so why give American readers grief?
I think to grief means something different in the States too. I certainly know skit does.
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