Gamer Girl here. Today's show is to work safe and family friendly, but we're going to

talk about how to deal with swearing. In novels, quotations, and other types of text, I'll

be bleeping out any swear words. My friends got Sigler and I were talking about his

new book, The Rookie the other day, and he mentioned that he had to do a lot of extra work

because of the swearing in it, which made me start thinking about swearing in general.

Here's what happened. The Rookie is a crazy book about a pro football league 700 years

in the future. Scott describes it as any given Sunday meets the Godfather, meets Star Wars.

So as you can imagine, language among such characters isn't always this pure as the

driven snow. Scott gave away the Rookie as a free podcast with adult language, and then

edited it to create a young adult version to sell as a hardcover book in iPhone app.

So he had to modify language to fit a young adult audience, yet still keep the story

integrity and intensity. Sometimes he was able to just drop off the offensive word, and

the paragraph kept its punch in meaning. I'll read a little bit of it so you can hear

it in context. Here's one section before editing. They can't handle being in the same cities

with the aliens. Being on the same buses, shadows, and transport tubes, I mean have you

ever seen a sqlornow up close? Stedman's face wrinkled with disgust. You can see right

through their skin, and they drool. It's a big ingestment. In that case, it's pretty

easy to take out the expletive. You can see right through their skin, and they drool.

It's a big adjustment. Other times, though, you can't just drop the expletive. You need

to replace it in order to communicate the same intensity, anger, or disgust. I'll read

it all the way through first again so you can hear it in context. Here's a section

before editing. It was too much to bear. Quentin turned and stormed away, heading out

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