Oh, the greatest sin of them all:

Blogging about blogging, that bloated, bloviating serpent devouring its own tail. And yet, here I am, blogging about blogging because many of you asked me to commit this very trespass.

I DO IT FOR YOU, MY LOVES.

*kisses the back of your hand*

*your hand falls off and plops wetly onto the floor, because it’s not a hand but rather a can of excised Spam meat-glued to a broken mophandle*

*eats your Spamhand*

Ahem.

You want my blogging advice?

I give you my blogging advice.

Don’t Blog!

There it is. That’s my advice to you. Don’t blog. Don’t do it. Not worth it. You’re probably asking me as a writer, and as a writer to another writer I say: mmmnope, fuck it. Don’t blog.

The blogs of writers are often sad, sad things. They go largely unused, acting as empty, gutted monuments to the writer’s own lack of blogging productivity. You visit a writer’s blog and the last post is from June, 2012. Wind blows sand over a corpse. The comment sections are, two, maybe three people deep (and the author is one of those commenters). One of the most recent posts is a promise to post more posts, to blog more blogs, to blargh more blarghs, and that post was three years ago. Two rats chew on a third rat. The ground is salted and dead.

Here you’re saying, But an agent or a publisher says I have to blog. To which I respond, that agent or publisher is operating on bad information from five years ago. And it was bad information then. Blogging because you have to? What an execrable task. Who wants to read a blog that you feel is an obligation? I want to read something the author wants to write, not filler content meant to prop up a dead thing. This isn’t Weekend At Bernie’s. “HEY LOOK AT MY BLOG IT’S TOTALLY ALIVE.” *waggles dead blog’s sunglasses* *forces dead blog to messily eat carrots and dip*

Now you’re saying, But I need a blog to sell my books, to which I respond, ha ha, whoa, yeah, no. Blogs don’t sell books unless your books contain your blog, or rather, content similar to your blog. Okay, an effective blog may sell your book over time, but as I am wont to tell people: I have over 7,000 daily subscribers at this blog and over 10,000 additional daily readers. All of these people are not buying my books. Some of them are. And sometimes I get people who tell me, after three years here they finally decided to check out an actual book of mine. And certainly this blog focuses as outreach to get the word out about my books and sometimes your books, too. It’s taken a while to get here. It was not overnight. And even now, it still doesn’t magically push my book sales. Which is of course the fallacy that agents and publishers are operating on when they tell you to blog: they think you will built a “platform” and use it to “sell books,” but it doesn’t really work like that. What works to sell books is when a publisher is committed to selling your book. Your cover reveal at your blog doesn’t mean a whole hot cup of poopsquat if you get like, 30 readers. You and your blog should not be your publisher’s primary avenue of marketing and advertising.

And now you’re saying, quite correctly, But Chuck, you do it. Yes. Yeah. I know. I do it because I am a mouthy shitknuckle who wants to blog. I don’t blog because I think it’s essential to my brand or my career, I blog because I really, really like blogging. I like having a place where I can get up onto my rickety scaffolding made of digital bones and squawk fruitlessly into the void. This blog began as — and often continues to be — me yelling at me about me. And sometimes, I yell at you, too. I have thoughts and this is where I share them.

And finally you’re saying, But I wanna blog, too.

Well, okay, then.

Then it’s time for a different set of advisory points.

Fine, You’re Going To Blog Anyway

Welcome to Der Bloggerhaus. Here is your blog.

*hands you a lump of half-eaten Spam*

No? Okay, fine, that’s not your blog. YOU PASSED YOUR FIRST TEST.

You want advice on writing a blog, I will give you a shotgun spray of it. Ready?

• Conventional wisdom says not to write about writing at your blog. I say “conventional wisdom” is a very good way to be a bad blogger. I say write what you want to write about. Kids, food, writing, monkey taming, driveway construction, bondage, art history, books, movies, coffee, Muay Thai kickboxing, true crime, fake limbs, whatever. It’s your space. It’s free to visit. It is your topical playground. Run wild and go down the slide naked. Unless it’s one of those metal slides and it’s a hot day because ow cooked buttocks.

• Probably don’t blog about one thing. Unless you wanna be known as THAT [subject] BLOGGER. “HEY LOOK,” someone will yell on the streets probably never but let’s pretend. “IT’S THAT MONKEY TAMING BLOGGER. THAT GUY’S ALWAYS WRITING ABOUT MONKEY TAMING.” Even me writing so much about writing here sometimes gets this labeled as a “writing blog” rather than a “writer’s blog.” I have also been called “dad blogger” and “death blogger.”

• Don’t advertise on your blog. I mean, advertise your books, fine. You are a writer and it’s fair to expect that. But I don’t want to think your blog is compromised by the greed of getting clicks. Once in a while I get someone criticizing this space and calling it CLICKBAIT, but ha ha, fuckers, I don’t make any money off your clicks. Makes no difference to me whether my numbers are up or down. (In this case, “clickbait” is usually an insult that translates to, “he said something I don’t agree with and he said it in his own way and what a jerk but it’s easier for me to dismiss the link as clickbait rather than engaging on its merits or flaws.”)

• Own your blog or at least backup your content.

• I like to occasionally blog using ALL CAPS because ALL CAPS are cool.

• Blog regularly. Doesn’t mean every day, but make sure it’s not ONCE EVERY SEVEN YEARS DESPITE PROMISING OTHERWISE. Once a week is probably good.

• Conventional wisdom (that pesky goblin!) again says, long blog posts do not work. Write short posts, they say. Yeah, fuck that. I regularly write long blog posts. My most popular blog posts are also the longest ones. If you are afraid of long-form content on a blog, just go post cat pictures and amateur porn-fic on your Tumblr. No harm in that.

• Moderate your comments. The Internet is so often a giant sucking Sarlacc pit of shittiness because unlike almost everywhere else in reality, comment sections are treated like bastions of freedom. And when you get bastions of freedom, you invite angry human cankersores whose mothers did not love them enough and they spatter their opinionated mucus all over everybody’s monitors. The reason Gamer-Gate doesn’t exist in public is because public spaces are driven by actual decorum and even actual laws against being a public nuisance (read: shitbird). DON’T READ THE COMMENTS is the common warning because too few websites and bloggers are willing to actually take an aggressive hand when moderating their comments. You don’t have to be perfect, but get active. The shittiness in the comments is, in part, on you.

• Please make sure we can all read your blog without blistering eyestrain. Everybody has different blog preferences, but a dark background and light text is a good way to make people’s brains bleed actual bloog. Aim for: Big, clear font. Bright, but not too bright background. Don’t make me read text over some kind of grungy, gribbly texture or a picture of unicorns fucking or something. You’re a writer. Treat a blog post like the page of a book.

• I like WordPress. Installed on my end. You don’t have to. You do as you like.

• Have an opinion, but as always, don’t be horrible about it. Be the best version of yourself online. Some of you are probably making worried faces as you realize that this blog very likely represents the best version of myself. *sheepish grin* Sorry!

• You’re a writer, so the quality of your blog should be an exemplar of your work. We’ll forgive imperfections and typos. But if your blog is just some mumblemouthed manifesto, written with all the quality afforded to slogans painted on a bathroom stall wall in your own waste, that’s not ideal. No, your blog won’t sell your books 100%, but it can damn sure turn people off of them, too.

• A blog isn’t a good way to sell books, but it is a good way to meet new people — people who may eventually become your readers. People who may even become your friends. Like all of you. You’re all my friends. Come over to my pool. Let’s have a party! Caveat: I don’t have a pool and I don’t like parties and that address I gave you is actually to an abandoned factory outside of town where a cabal of forgotten clowns live. Say hi to Mister Squeakers and his gang!

• Link to your blog a few times a day over social media to make sure people across various timezones see it. But don’t make every tweet a link to it. That’s gross. Stop that.

• Your blog is you. It should echo your voice. It should demonstrate who you are and what you believe — a larger, more direct version of the voice people will get inside your books. This blog and my books do not sound exactly alike, nor should they. But both, hopefully, sound like me. And your blog and your books should sound like you.

Otherwise, my advice remains the same:

Don’t blog.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

The opening sentence to a story (be it a short story all the way up to a novel) matters. It’s the first bullet fired in a war — you don’t have to kill the enemy leader with it, but you also oughta make it count. It’s the line that hooks the reader. The line that sets everything up. It’s the first thing the reader sees upon stepping into the world you’ve created.

So, it’s worth getting it right.

Let’s workshop your opening line.

Take the opening line to something you’re writing / have written and, if comfortable, share it below in the comments. Then, others will have at it — offering what will ideally be constructive criticism (why they like it, where they think it needs improvement). If you post a line, you should also offer commentary on someone else’s opening line, because Quid pro quo, Clarice.

(Now, this is an imperfect criticism because the opening line of course never actually stands alone; it exists in context with the rest of the opening page. Just the same, this should make an interesting challenge, don’t you think?)

Go forth and workshop, young wordy padawans.

So, given all the hullaballoo with Clean Reader (“read books, not profanity”) this week, I thought a flash fiction challenge in pure defiance had some meaning.

Thus:

I want you to be inspired by that debacle.

I want you to write filthily.

Or write about filth.

Sex, profanity, perversion. Fiction or meta-fiction.

Any genre.

In some way, take something from the discussion about censorship and profanity and vulgarity and sex and — well, throw all that stuff into a blender, whip it up, and see what foamy frappe belches out into your story.

We’ll say you have 2000 words for this one because fuck it, that’s why.

Post the story at your online space.

Link to that story in the comments below.

Due by next Friday, April 3rd, noon EST.

The Clean Reader saga continues:

– Joanne Harris has another round of reply and response with the Clean Reader folks.

– Lilith Saintcrow had a reply and response round, too — and got her books taken off the site.

– Jennifer Porter hilariously looks at what Clean Reader actually does, and lists the word replacements (and notes, as Joanne does, that it scrubs references to female anatomy and changes them all to “bottom,” thus suggesting that Clean Reader is not-so-secretly a fan of anal sex).

– Smashwords has removed access to its library, so its books won’t automatically end up at the Clean Reader store anymore.

(They have a book of mine — The Cormorant — for sale, which is ha ha ohhh, not actually awesome because that book is no longer for sale. It has changed publishers and will be republished by Simon & Schuster SAGA in April, so how exactly they’re selling that book is somewhat beyond me. They also have Kick-Ass Writer for sale, and at this point I’m pretty sure that any of my books run through their colonic cleansing process will cause whatever device is using it to catch fire and melt into a ball of sparking, smoking slag.)

For those saying that this doesn’t modify the file and isn’t illegal — well, maybe so. I’m not a lawyer. Lots of things are legal that I think jolly well shouldn’t be. For my mileage, that this modifies the reader’s experience is the same as modifying the book. Yes, the file of the book has meaning, but so does the content, and when you change the content or allow it to be changed, that concerns me.

Look at it this way:

Imagine that in the real world there existed a bookstore, and the clerk at this store will modify any book on the shelves and sell it to you. He’ll change words, characters, whatever. He makes money off the exchange. The book received is not the book you wrote.

Okay, your objection to that is — ahh, but this is the reader’s choice and it’s not one change but an entire host of permutational programmatic changes, so, okay.

Let’s change the story.

Imagine that in the online world (which is still real, by the way), there existed an online bookstore and the magical online robot at this store will modify any book on their digital shelves and sell it to you. The content of the book — whether technically changed or overlaid with changes — is marred. And not just with one set of changes but with a whole host of permutational possibilities — a finite set, however, of those possibilities, because a book contains only so many tsk-tsk naughty fuckbuckets and shitkittens within its pages, and so only so many changes are possible.

Maybe that sits okay with you.

It does not sit well with me.

The reader can take my books and do whatever he or she wants with them after sale. Read them backward, forward, upside-down, block out whole pages of text, draw dong doodles in all the margins, write phone numbers in the front, scratch out my name on the cover and write in theirs, use it as a butt plug for an elephant. The trick is, you then cannot go and sell that modification back to the consumer. Much as you are free to mod a game or download mods to a game — but you are not then able to sell/resell the game with that mod (or a host of potential mods embedded in or overlaid upon the code) in place.

And so, the battle against this silly, septic product continues. As the only profane thing here that I can see is what this app does to books and stories and history.

Hilariously, if you used this app, you could have substitutions like:

Was: “Jon Snow was the bastard son of House Stark.”

Becomes: “Jon Snow was the jerk son of House Stark.”

Was: “The bitch had her puppies.”

Becomes: “The witch had her puppies.”

Was: “This chicken breast is delicious.”

Becomes: “This chicken chest is delicious.”

Was: “The needle stuck in his arm with a prick.”

Becomes: “The needle stuck in his arm with a groin.”

Was: “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

Becomes: “Geez is the Son of God.” / “Gee Gosh is the Son of God”

Was: “Would you care for one of these Oscar Meyer wieners?”

Becomes: “Would you care for one of these Oscar Meyer groins?”

Was: “She’s a real pussycat.”

Becomes: “SHE’S A REAL BOTTOMCAT.”

Was: “Oh, fuck, I want you to put your prick inside me and fuck my asshole.”

Becomes: “Oh, freak, I want you to put your groin inside me and freak my jerk.”

Just a sampling of the absurd delights! Change the words but don’t change any of the context or content for maximum whatthefuckery. (Because changing words doesn’t change what goes on inside the book. Just because you change the words fuck my asshole doesn’t mean the sentiment isn’t still fuck my asshole — and the scene that ensues is likely very much about some kind of anal penetration with all the context and sexery remaining relatively explicit. Changing a few words does nothing except make explicit material goofy.)

Good times.

For my mileage, if you require action items:

You can email them at cleanreader@inktera.com and demand your books be taken off.

You can also talk to your publishers about keeping your books off of Clean Reader.

You can air your grievances on Twitter — they are at @CleanReader.

And you can rate and review the app at either the iTunes or Google Play marketplaces.

When countryboy Teo arrives in the coastal city of Tabat, he finds it a hostile place, particularly to a boy hiding an enormous secret. It’s also a city in turmoil, thanks to an ancient accord to change governments and the rising demands of Beasts, the Unicorns, Dryads, Minotaurs and other magical creature on whose labor and bodies Tabat depends. And worst of all, it’s a city dedicated to killing Shifters, the race whose blood Teo bears. 

When his fate becomes woven with that of Tabat’s most famous gladiator, Bella Kanto, his existence becomes even more imperiled. Kanto’s magical battle determines the weather each year, and the wealthy merchants are tired of the long winters she’s brought. Can Teo and Bella save each other from the plots that are closing in on them from all sides?

IF YOU’RE A WRITER, YOU’RE IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL

The book that’s coming out in April, Beasts of Tabat, is one that I’ve been working on, in one form or another, since the fall of 2005. (And before you ask, yes boy howdy, it’s extremely satisfying to see it finally coming into print.)

I put one version aside, came back to it, wrote three other novels, but kept returning, incorporating what I was learning over a long span of time. In this I’ve differed from some friends who I’ve seen publish longer works faster, but the thing that’s kept being emphasized is that writing is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s okay to pace yourself accordingly.

One of the nice things about all that labor is that a) the three following books are mapped out (at least the overall highlights) and b) book number two, Hearts of Tabat, arrived partially written already because it focuses on two characters who got shifted out of Beasts. So a lot of it is written — it’s just that I still need to make it make sense on the page as well as it does in my head.

Even when finished, it kept being a long haul. I sent it off to my agent, he shopped it around, and there weren’t any offers that didn’t feel a bit exploitative to the point where neither he nor I wanted to say yes. That took a year and a half and if I hadn’t started working on something else immediately after handing it off, I would have gone crazy, I think. It helps to have worked in software — you gotta ship that product and then move onto the next thing.

TO THY OWNSELF BE TRUE IS ON THE MARK

I learned that you can be true to yourself and worry later about the publishing. I wrote the book I wanted to write, in a world that has fascinated me ever since I first set a story in it, and I wrote an unlikely pair of protagonists, who I deeply love. This book wanders around in both fantasy and more literary territory in a way that, I hope, will satisfy both kinds of readers. I didn’t try to write a book according to what I thought was marketable, and Beasts is strong in part because of that. There’s sex and violence, and swordfights, and all of the things that make a fantasy novel so much fun, but I put them in -because- they were fun, not because they’re part of a formula.

I don’t mean to make it sound as though I think everyone else is writing to a formula, because that’s not what I’m getting at. What I want to say is, it’s okay to sit down and write and find out what happens. What emerges is a landscape all at once already unfamiliar and totally unknown. Writing by the seat of your pants can yield amazing stuff if you’re willing to look around and readjust your course every once in a while.

YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN

I’ve learned that you can come back to a world over and over again, learning more about it each time. One of the things I’ve found myself doing is assembling the history of the world out of the stories that I’ve written in it so far, I think close to a dozen now, and I’ve found in doing that task that many of those stories fit in some way with the overall novel. In fact, “In the Lesser Southern Isles,” a story that appeared in a pirate anthology called Black Sails and then in my collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, prefigures a good part of Book Three, tentatively titled Exiles of Tabat.

One of the concepts key to the book came out of a short story of mine that Clarkesworld Magazine published, called “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said.” It’s a detail that stuck with me, and in the novel we learn more about it and the people who’ve employed. (I apologize for being ambiguous, but I hate spoilers.)

The city is almost as much a character as any other, and one of the things I love about it is the history of it that I’ve developed over time, including all the little quirks that make it distinctive, some of which I hope come across in the book. For more of that texture, I’m running some flash pieces set in that world every weekday through the last week of March and the first half of April.

THINGS ARE CHANGING

Not so much in the writing, but in the selling, I learned a lot about the ways that publishing is changing. I’m publishing Beasts with a small press, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta’s Wordfire Press. I’d published two collections with small presses before then and learned that I had to do a lot of things myself, but refreshingly enough, Wordfire isn’t like that. It is one of the most professional outfits I’ve worked with, actually, and one of the things I’m looking forward to seeing at Emerald City Comic Con is how they use their booth to push books as well as awareness of the press.

NETWORKING = DOUBLE PLUS GOOD

I learned that networking really is important. I sold the book myself due to a chance conversation at MileHighCon in Denver when my spouse and I stopped there on our way through town. And now that I’m trying to push the book, a lot of the contacts that I’ve made in the past are coming into play.

One of the fun things is that the book owes a good bit to a session of Taos Toolbox where Saladin Ahmed was workshopping Throne of the Crescent Moon and Scott Andrews was thinking about forming an online magazine that would become Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Now the book’s got a lovely blurb from Saladin on the cover, and Scott is running a companion novelette, “Primaflora’s Journey,” in April along with a book giveaway.

I’ve tried to go to places where I knew I had fans already is promoting it — as another example, there’ll be another piece of fiction, a flash story called “A Souvenir of Tabat” will be appearing as a free read on Quarterreads.com, where I’ve published a lot of flash pieces for the first week the book’s around. I’m not saying that writers should be meticulously tracking who owes them favors — but when it comes time to promote a book, it’s a good time to see who you feel comfortable enlisting and spending a little time putting together that roster.

 * * *

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com as well as three collections and her latest work, the novel Beasts of Tabat. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction, see:

Cat Rambo: Website | Tumblr | Twitter

Beasts of Tabat: Amazon | Wordfire

There exists a new app called Clean Reader.

The function of Clean Reader is to scrub the profanity from e-books.

Their tagline: “Read books. Not profanity.”

You can dial in how much of the profanity you want gone from the books.

Author Joanne Harris has roundly (and to my mind, correctly) condemned the app, and I would recommend you read about her and condemnation. I would further suggest you go on and read the email she received from the Clean Reader people and, more importantly, her response to that email. (Oh, also: check her tweets, too: @JoanneChocolat.)

I am an author where much of my work utilizes profanity. Because fuck yeah, profanity. Profanity is a circus of language. It’s a drunken trapeze act. It’s clowns on fire. And let’s be clear up front: profanity is not separate from language. It is not lazy language. It is language. Just another part of it. Vulgarity has merit. It is expressive. It is emotive. It is metaphor.

So, as someone with a whole pig wagon full of fucks at stake, let be be clear:

Fuck you, Clean Reader.

*cups hand to mouth*

Fuuuuuuck. Yoooooooou.

*fuckecho through the canyon of fucks*

Please let me condemn your app in whatever obscene gesture you find most obscene.

Let me unpack this a little.

When I write a book, I write it a certain way. I paint with words. Those words are chosen. They do not happen randomly. The words and sentences and paragraphs are the threads of the story, and when you pluck one thread from the sweater, the whole thing threatens to unravel — or, at least, becomes damaged. You may say, Well, Mister Wendig, surely your books do not require the profanity, to which I say, fuck you for thinking that they don’t. If I chose it, and the editor and I agree to keep it, then damn right it’s required. It’s no less required than a line of dialogue, or a scene of action, or a description of a goddamn motherfucking lamp. Sure, my book could exist without that dialogue, that action, that goddamn motherfucking lamp.

But I don’t want it to. That’s your book, not my book.

My consent matters when it comes to the book.

If changes are necessary to the book — then I consent to making them.

An editor sends me edits, I can say whether those edits fly or not.

Just as the publisher can consent to the book they publish.

That’s the deal. That’s how this works.

And here you may say:

But what of the consent of the reader?

To which I respond:

Your consent as a reader is being able to pick up the book or not. Your consent as a reader comes into play as to whether or not you put down that book at some point throughout because something within it was objectionable: bad story, unlikeable protagonist, toxic ideas, or even yes, crass and septic vulgarity. That’s the contract the reader and the author share, and this is true with books and movies and comics and really all stories. You consent to buying the ticket. I consent to taking you on the ride. Neither of us get to modify that contract halfway in. We don’t get to change the experience unless somehow the engine of change is built into the content (as with many games). You can’t change the story. I can’t steal your book.

(Here I’ll note that on an individual level, if you really want to go through my book and hand-edit out the profanity, fine. Thing is, you still have to read the profanity to do that — and that means not relying on an app to categorically and programmatically make edits to the text.)

You may say, But I want to read your books, just without all that nasty business.

To which I say, then I don’t want you reading my books. Nothing personal, but I wrote the thing the way I wrote the thing. If that troubles you, then I don’t want you reading it. No harm, no foul. Surely there are other sanitized, anesthetized stories that will grant you greater comfort. But don’t sanitize mine. Don’t anesthetize my work or the work of any author. Do not take that consent away from us. It is immoral. Is it illegal? That, I don’t know, but honestly, I’m hoping it turns out to be true (as honestly, I’d want this thing shut down).

I’m not a fan of slippery slopes, but programmatically removing or changing information from a book? It’s bad shenanigans. Given that this app seems custom-made to serve Christian ideals (see: replacing “bitch” with “witch”) where does it stop? Cutting out an abortion scene and replacing it with a scene where the child survives? Moving a sex scene and replacing it with a scene where the young couple sits and quietly reads the Bible? If a character is objectionable, will you replace it with a goddamn motherfucking lamp so that it doth not offend?

(Sorry, I mean, “Gosh-darn Monday-through-Friday lamp.”)

Look at their website, where on their blog they note that author Mark Henshaw “…makes it a point to write well enough that he doesn’t need to include profanity in his writing.”

Oh, no you didn’t.

Conflating quality with a lack of profanity?

*vomits up a whole bag of middle fingers and dumps them into your lap*

In another blog post, they talk of this like you’re just someone ordering food at a restaurant: oh, ha ha, I don’t like blue cheese so I just order my food without it, and this is exactly like that. Except yeah, no, it’s not. Never mind the problem with conflating food you buy and books you read, let’s instead assume that if you find blue cheese so categorically offensive that you shouldn’t order food with blue cheese in it. Chefs fucking hate when you order food with inane substitutions. Instead of viewing our books like customizable meals, let’s instead pretend like our words are the ingredients list on a procured food product — just because you don’t like maltodextrin doesn’t mean I can whimsically pluck it out without the chemical composition of the food product falling apart. It’s in there. Too late. Don’t like it, don’t buy it.

Their purpose in creating the app was:

“One day our oldest child came home from school and she was a little sad.  We asked her what was wrong and she said she had been reading a book during library time and it had a few swear words in it.  She really liked the book but not the swear words.  We told her that there was probably an app for this type of thing that would replace profanity with less offensive words and perhaps we should get her a tablet that she could use to read books with.  To our surprise there wasn’t an app like this.  The more we thought about this idea the more we wanted it to be a reality.  Eventually we decided we would do all we could to bring Clean Reader to the world.  We’ve been putting as much time and money into it as we could over the last few years and we’re excited to see it launch soon!”

Hey, listen, I have a kid. He’s not even four. I don’t edit the material that reaches his eyes. I control the flow of that information and when something lands in front of him that’s deep or confusing or in conflict to my beliefs, I don’t water it down. We talk about it. My son isn’t even four and we can have conversations about it. That discussion is meaningful. Far, far more meaningful than if I had simply edited out unlikable material and replaced it with something more comfortable. (You’d be surprised how often this happens even with kids books — children’s books are surprisingly judgeypants toward obesity, and as such, requires some discussion with the boy.) What books are these people letting their fourth grader read? “This book, Requiem for a Dream, sounded so polite. I mean, requiems! And dreams! But it wasn’t! No, sir, it wasn’t! What poppycock! Wait, is poppycock profane? There’s that word, ‘cock’ and so we must create an app to find all the ‘cocks’ and replace them with pictures of happy chickens. Chickens can’t be offensive! Especially because they’re so delicious, at least when nobody has put that blasphemous blue cheese all over them ha ha ha condemn Satan praise God burn foul-mouthed witches.”)

Education isn’t about concealment of information. It isn’t about the eradication or modification of offensive language, or ideas, or information. It’s about presenting truth when a child or an adult are ready to hear it, and then talking about it. Anything else is how you get Jesus riding dinosaurs, or a loss of climate change, or the eradication of women or people of color from the pages of history, all because it doesn’t line up with preconceived notions and pre-existing comfort levels.

Stories aren’t bulletin boards. You don’t pull down thumbtacked bits and replace them with your own. And that’s what this app does — it doesn’t merely censor. It edits. It changes. You can’t do that. Changes cascade. It’s like stepping on a butterfly in the past and waking up to a future where a T-Rex is your accountant. Stories aren’t echo chambers. They’re wild, untamed, unkempt territory. You don’t get to prune it into a bonsai shape that you prefer.

Authors write the books they want to write.

And you can read them as they are written.

That’s it. Game over.

You want differently?

Go buy Mad Libs. They let you insert whatever fucking words you like.