A recent Authors Electric blog post about the use of swear words in fiction reminded me that The Baptist deserves a bit of Christmas exposure for its alleged profane content. (If you are offended by profanity then stop the #$%!!! right there and here are some cute kittens instead.)

The Baptist - a psychological thriller
available in e-book and paperback

A couple of winters ago I emailed a pdf of The Baptist to a friend's work. My email was intercepted and she received an automatic report from her employer's Mail Sweeper program.

This e-mail has been stopped in Profane Messages. 

The MIMEsweeper Analysis results were attached. The report was studied by all and sundry at tea-break and the content provoked a bit of discussion. Irish tea-breaks are an occasion for great craic. The consensus was The Baptist contained a lot of action but not enough components to perform it. More parts of speech were needed. They're a very droll bunch.

The report results are below and I have to say that, while I didn't intend to write a profane novel, I can still now remember exactly each and every page where the offending words occur.

The phrase 'arse' was found at location 70126
and so on. I'll just share the count.
arse x 1
balls x 2
bang x 3
bastard x 12 (a dozen, one of them capitalized therefore a pronoun?)
bitch x 6 (half dozen, imperial measure)
bloody x 8 (quaint that bloody should be a profanity these days, actually mostly describing murder weapons)
blow job x 1 (shouldn't I have hyphenated the blow-job? Is that what I've been doing wrong)
bollocks x 1 (shouldn't there be at least two of those fellas? No wait, it's a plural)
crap x 2 (in UK and Ireland it's an expletive, in the ROW it's a game, apparently you can shoot it and everything)
cunt x 3 (I do apologise, it's a very vulgar word but, in my defence, it was, or rather they were, components of dialogue. Vulgar dialogue. Not uncommon in Ireland. Lady Chatterley's Lover is full of them.)
fag x 5 (means cigarette in UK and Ireland and that was the intended meaning)
fuck x 10 (no argument there and good to see it's gone decimal)
fucker x 4 (nice alliteration and I'm getting an idea for a Christmas song now)
fucking x 21 (more than a score - in fairness, there is a lot of that sort of thing in The Baptist, it's not all murdering)
penis x 1 (poor little lad, all on his own, but just goes to show it takes only one)
prick x 3 (oh, right ... well, now we have a handful)
queer x 1 (surely acceptable as an adjective?)
sex x 7 (vanilla version is profane?)
sexy x 2 (sexy too)
shirt-lifter x 1 (at least it's hyphenated. Homophobic, but forgivable as it's in dialogue)
shit x 11 (one short of the dozen)
shite x 1 (the Irish for above, to make up that dozen)
slut x 1 (so few?)
wanker x 1 (there's always one)
white trash x 2 (I'm still confused, is that profane?)

Right, Christmas approaches. So, in the spirit of the season, I offer:

The Baptist Profane Twelve Days of Christmas

(I'll just go to straight to the last verse)

Twelve days of ChristmasOn the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Twelve bastards bragging
Eleven shits a fan-hitting
Ten fucks a flying
Nine fucking expletives (cheated, there wasn't nine of anything)
Eight bloody bus stops
Seven sex in the opens
Six bitches barking
Five ... fags ... a ... puffing!
Four fighting fuckers
Three quiet cunts
Two dangly balls
And a slut arse-wanker penis blow-job bollocks.

(The leftovers are a spare queer sexy shirt-lifter shite white trash, sounds like one of my characters.)

Now, singalong everyone.

All in the name of literary art, my dears.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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