June 26 is National Disability Independence Day

I have written several times in this space about swearing in murder mystery novels. In fact, if you do a Google search for profanity in mystery novels my blog posts are among the first references you’ll see.

What got me started on the subject, as I explained in one of my previous posts, was curiosity about my own use of profanity. After my first Nostalgia City mystery was published I got to wondering how many four-letter words I used and how that compared to other writers’ work.

I discovered, of course, that the use of profanity varies greatly in the genre, from no cussing whatsoever in many cozies to an abundance of f***ing vulgarity in the grittier forms of murder mysteries.

Unfortunately this necessitates further explanation before I can get to the reason I want to talk about bad words in the first place. Above I used asterisks rather than spelling out the obvious word. It’s my journalistic background that cemented the AP stylebook into my vocabulary. Many news outlets today—although there seem to be fewer and fewer—do not use four letter words and substitute asterisks. The older I get the less I care about maintaining this illusion of superiority. And certainly I use crude words—sparingly—in my novels. Lots of people swear these days and I believe I need to use “those words” to be realistic.

So this brings me to a funking problem. You read that correctly. Continue Reading →