Vice Party - The Good, the Bad and the Nearly Useless

I don't get to indulge many vices, more's the pity. When it comes to the buffet of vices, I still sit at the kiddy table. Alcohol, which I used to enjoy (Lemon Drop anyone?) now equals migraine. Chocolate, too. The list of fun things that end badly for me is long and sad. Since I can't consume vices, I spew them instead. And still, they turn in service to writing.

1. Swearing is my vocation. It's a calling, a sacred duty to which I am devoted. Since the public rooms of the bordello strive to appear slightly family friendly, I curb my colorful language. Meet me in a public situation one or two times and you'll have no idea of the vast, simmering cesspool of language underlying my polite facade. Hang around long enough to lull me into a sense of safety, though, and that pool will bubble over. Most of my friends still look surprised when a word or phrase slips out. Many of them giggle, too. Does it help me while I'm writing? Probably. If only to give me the ammunition to complain in grotesque detail about how a story is or isn't coming together.

2. Analyzing. I have a degree in overthinking. It is a hindrance part of the time. The other part of the time, I'm making it work for me. Everything I watch, read or experience gets vivisected - how did the story go together? Did the conflict work? If no, why not? If yes, why? What would make a poor plot work? How could things have been changed. This is all part and parcel of peering beneath the hood to learn how something runs (or doesn't) so I can build my own.

3. Companion to that: I talk too much. No one wants to watch The Walking Dead with me anymore. I usually see within the first several minutes of an episode how it will end, and often, within the first episode or two, I can tell how a season will end. These are the wages of analyzing stories as a mode of living. Sure, sure, I learned long ago to not volunteer the spoilers. I may be slow, but I can be taught. Still, my TWD friends and family keep casting sidelong glances my way during a show. Finally someone will ask if I have it figured out. There's a second of silence when I shrug and nod. One of them will grin and say, "What's your theory?" I blab. Everyone laughs and blows me off. Until the end of the episode/season. How does this help my writing? It's concrete evidence that I've managed to learn valuable lessons about conflict and story arc - not just as an intellectual exercise. They're internalized. Keith likes to talk through movies and TV shows we've watched. Mostly, I think, he likes getting to geek out about a show with me. But tonight, while reading on his Kindle, he turned to me and said, "You know I can't read some of these books now without remembering what you've said about stories. About how there has to be both internal and external conflict that comes from who the characters are before a story really starts to resonate. You turned me into a tea snob over the years and now you're turning me into a story snob. A few scantily clad women and a couple of explosions used to be enough." High praise. I'm going to let this help me stop worrying about whether or not I'm doing it right. I'm just going to write and trust that conflict and plot will take care of itself.

4. The occasional bag of sour cream and onion potato chips because some times, you just need to grind the bones of your demons between your teeth. They taste salty. Like my writer tears. Or the blood of the innocents sacrificed to the gods of word count.

Love, Hate and Other Four Letter Words

Ridley Scott established that in space, no one can hear you scream. (Alien, 1979) In space, can anyone hear you swear?

In general, I have no objections to any word anywhere. It's along the lines of my own peculiar notion that there's no such thing as evil. There's only energy. What you do with it is good or bad. Words are the same to me. They're only a collection of letters to express an idea. What you do with that idea is what can turn something obscene into a thing of beauty or vice verse.

Given all of that, there are still times when a gal needs to pull all the stops and spew a long and steady stream of filth. Cause if she doesn't, she won't be able to cope with the monster in the hall. Studies have shown that swearing eases pain. Something about bottling up the emotion associated with stubbing the crap out of your toe (or breaking one kicking the door on accident when you meant to kick a cat toy...) increases the perception of pain. If swearing does indeed impact physiology, does that mean that there's a biological basis for having a potty mouth? And if there is, does that negate the cultural and societal disapproval of using profanity?

Regardless. When my mom read my first book, her first comment about the heroine? "She swears a lot." Yes. Yes, she does. I made sure she had reason. But you won't find a single swear word you'd recognize (except bitch which isn't really used as a swear word when it is describing a female animal of a particular species...maybe that's another debate). The nice thing and the hard thing about writing a scifi series wherein the cultures didn't originate on Earth is that these cultures will have developed their own swear words, their own turns of profane phrase. (Remember in your first language class how hard you worked to learn a few of the swear words? If *those* had shown up on tests, how many of us would have aced our high school language requirement?) I say it's a nice thing because I get to make up my own swear words. It's hard because I have to make up swear words that don't all sound the same.

Ultimately, whatever words end up spoken, it's all about emotion isn't it? My sister refuses to let my niece listen to certain musicians because of the 'bad words' in their lyrics. I *like* angry, explicit lyrics because of the stories I hear behind the words and because of the overwhelming emotion that drove those words out of someone in song. I love the sense that there are some things that simply cannot be communicated without the driving beat, the discordant musical line and THOSE specific words. It's something, if I'm going to use recognizable profanity in a story, I want to convey when my characters say the words. At that point in the conflict, I want them driven to swearing in such a way that nothing else could possibly have been done or said. That puts the onus on me to make sure I get the emotional pitch right. And that's damned hard.