The Language

I have a foul mouth.

To paraphrase one of my favorite movies of all time, I work in profanity like a grand master works in oils colors. I really like to swear. Foul and colorful language is like the salt and pepper of my vocabulary. When I am hewing and sowing in my colorful way I always feel good.

Does that make me a damn weirdo?

Probably, but I don’t really care. I grew up in a house with a mother who used language that would make a longshoreman blush. I don’t shy away from real language. And that is really the main point I am driving toward in my own fucked up way. This is the way people talk, when they are not on their best behavior the vast majority of people will lapse into conversational profanity.

I have been criticized for my rough language. I actually had an editor use it as the carrot and the stick on me once. They were going to “allow me” to swear as much as I wanted in my book if I made the changes they wanted to the bones of the story.

No thank you.

I will write what I want and I will curse as much as I want as well.

But I am not bitching about them. They are good people and my working relationship with them was fun even if we ended up mutually parting ways. You live, you learn, and you move the fuck on.

Now all of that being said there are exceptions.

When I am talking with friends and family I will curse up a blue streak. I have had more than one person ask me to keep it down because we were in public. If it makes my companions uncomfortable I will adjust for them, I mean hey if I choose to hang out with them in my free time I probably like them and their comfort matters to me. If it’s someone I can’t stand I may actually ramp it up, but then I am an asshole that way.

Work is another matter all together. My day job is my income and it is my income which allows me to feed and clothe my children. There is a degree of professionalism which is expected in my working environment, I knew this when I took the job and adjusted my mental stance accordingly. That being said confining myself to “Appropriate Language” always leaves me feeling slightly unarmed. Almost like a gunslinger with half the shells removed from his weapon.

My writing is another matter. When I am writing my fiction, and to a lesser extant my nonfiction, I tend to write like I think. And I am not sorry to tell you that I think like I fucking speak, except in my mind I am a Viking warrior with a full head of hair and a battle axe. I swear in my dialog and I swear in my description, that was what stuck in the craw of my former associates, and I will never apologize for that. I write to make myself happy. Not to produce a cookie cutter piece of work.

Now I have the idea for a children’s book in my mind these days. When I actually get to work on this I will be excising the foul language, not because I am knuckling under to pressure but because it is not appropriate to the story I want to write. Also I am releasing a Young Adult (YA) zombie serial this fall and while there is some sparse cursing in it the work as a whole would be appropriate for prime time network television.

So yeah.

I like to swear.

I won’t apologize.

I’m not sorry … and you shouldn’t be either.

      - Josh