When Time Skips to the Beat

Time does that sometimes you know?

Very nearly done with the typing, and very excited to get down to the nitty gritty of making this book perfect. I've got a bottle of Dakota Red from Private Reserve that I've been itching to use. I've for a conference in July for the job that pays the bills, that will leave me with oodles of time in a hotel room (because really, who schedules a conference in Arizona in mid-July?) to edit.

I've had a thought about genre's lately. Who am I writing for? Who is my audience? I mean, my audience is always me; I write the stories that I want to read, but where do my stories fit in in the grand scheme?
I've always been a little disappointed in the schism that exists between YA and adult literature. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with either kind of literature, but there's a gulf between the two, some missing years and experience that people either forget to write about or are too scared to.
YA books tend to deal with the Harry Potters of the world. They're budding teens full of hormones and anger, but they never swear and their riskiest moments with the opposite sex (or same sex) are stolen kisses they then think about forever. They're light stories, bereft of the gritty details that growing up often entails. Then you move on to adult literature where it becomes permissible to say 'shit' and for all manner of behavior.
But in books there is no bridge. It's almost like if you write a story with a teenage (or early twenties) character, you must write a certain way and ignore whole hosts of behavior. Teenagers are risky, thrill-seeking hedonists who are not adults, but who want to act like them. Yet the literature doesn't reflect that.

So it's confusing about where my story(ies) fit in, because I have three 17ish characters who swear and drink and make life and death decisions and then giggle for days over the double entendre implications of the word "sack." It's a story with really touching and great moments, some really silly moments, but also some extraordinarily dark moments as well. Maybe it's like the BSG of YA lit.

So I'm not a big fan of "hey look what I bought," but I bought this moleskine journal from a place called Modo Fly and they "etch" the journals with artwork done by various artists. It's absolutely awesome. So while I'm doing the editing thing, I'm going to write an anthology of horror stories in it. Just something to do while I edit. But I have some big, super big plans for it, so I'll drop them in here later.

Can you catch arthritis from a keyboard?

The typing has jumped ahead and I finished the second notebook today. I'm looking forward to a very quiet weekend this weekend to make a significant dent in the third and final notebook. After that I have to redo my first chapter (in which I'll combine chapters 1-3 and thus get into the action sooner) and rework two other chapters I was unhappy with. After that I can do my first full read through/edit.

I was reading a book and I was suddenly struck by a thought regarding profanity in writing. I'm a fan of profanity. I like curse words and frankly I don't think we have enough of them. I'm also not shy about using them in my own writing when appropriate, but that's where I'm having an issue: when is it appropriate?

For me, I feel like if a character would say it, then go for it. For instance, if I was a character in a novel and in that novel I happened to be driving in rush hour traffic, I'd be inventing new ways to call someone a soiled douche like there was no tomorrow. So for me, swearing, a little or a HUGE amount is totally okay, so long as it's something the character would say.

My issue comes when the narrator uses profanity and the narrator isn't the first person. A first person narrator is still a character in the story, but what about a third person? Here's the quote that got me started, "It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shantytown seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky."

I'm not offended by the word, I think I'm offended by the laziness exhibited by the author who resorted to a profanity. I mean I get it, maybe it's the author's way of trying to desensitize the audience to words like shit, but my generation is used to words like shit,and in my opinion shit carries no more weight than doody. Shit is also not overly descriptive. If the author was trying to make the point that the shantytown was haphazard and a ripe mess, there are other words for shit that could have served better and been far more descriptive. Diarrhea for example would have certainly evoked a lurid image (and would have worked especially well for a town with a name like Spatters).

Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I'm being overly sensitive, maybe I'm too old-fashioned. I guess I just sort of think that my job as a writer is to describe things, to give my readers as many tools as I possibly can so that they can really get into my work. Sometimes I can get too descriptive, but hey, that's what I do. But in a third person narrative, I just think that profanity should only be coming out of the mouths of the characters.

Thoughts?