One Star Betty

Just before the May 2020 simultaneous release of False Assurances and Threat Bias, I received a warning from an expert in the book trade: “Be prepared for your first one-star review.”

Right, I thought. No problem. I have a thick skin. I can handle a negative review.

Which is a lie, of course. I’m sensitive, and I waited with some trepidation for what would inevitably arrive. I realistically expected some readers to dislike my stories. After all, you can’t please everyone, all the time.

Enter: Betty. On May 16, 2020, “Betty” gave me my first one-star review, commenting, “Started reading the book and was enjoying it until he started using the F word.”

Hmm… I thought. I knew, of course, that there was some profanity in the story. I wanted to keep the jargon and lingo accurate to the characters and to their dialogue. Furthermore, the story starts out on the water, and there’s some colorful language. “Curse like a sailor” is, indeed, a thing.

It had never occurred to me to do a word count, and so it was a surprise that I found eighty examples of Betty’s bad word in False Assurances. However, when Betty went on to write, “Seemed like he was just adding words to fill the page,” that’s an exaggeration. Those eighty, out of 95,798 words, did not make a difference in filling the pages…

But in another respect, Betty was correct, and in some instances, the profanity wasn’t necessary. When I wrote Subversive Addiction, I was much more thoughtful, and there are only eight f-bombs. I’ll admit that Betty is now in my head, not just in profanity, but in word choice. Every word counts, and in my third book, I wanted to write with more precision.

Yet, there’s another angle, which I think is fascinating on a different level. Consider this: in the first eight chapters, or thirty-nine pages of False Assurances, three people are murdered. Shot in the head. Dead. And, in the same pages, there are two instances of the f-word.

Have we become so desensitized to violence that it’s okay to write about killing people, but, by golly gosh, it’s not okay to curse?

Now, I don’t know about your specific moral compass, but in my view, I think that killing is a worse sin than swearing. Betty, I would guess, might disagree. Sorry, Betty, I think you missed the mark, but I remain grateful to you for your inadvertent lesson in word choice.