By now I’m sure everyone’s read about the new Clean Reader app, if not here’s the link.

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This has given a lot of readers and writers rage face, crying censorship etc., but okay, it’s not like anyone HAS to use it. But for me it brings to mind a thing I’ve seen happening lately that makes my eyeballs twitch. Firstly let’s take children out of the equation. Despite the fact that most of us were reading above our age appropriateness as wee ones, I accept that parents get to decide what they do and don’t want their children exposed to in books. But let’s talk about grownups. GROWNUPS! Adults. Big people. There was a hoopla I saw online recently over readers proposing that authors put ‘trigger warnings’ on their books so that readers would know if something in said book might offend their personal sensibilities. They complain in reviews that they wished they’d known about the potty words or other content they find distasteful, that someone should have warned them that they were about to be exposed to this.

To this I say, firstly, read the blurb. This brief synopsis of the story, while clearly not revealing all of the varied content within, usually gives you a pretty good idea what you’re getting into. If it sounds like something you won’t like, don’t read it. But beyond that? Cheese and crackers, shut the fudge up. You’re a grownup. You live in a place called REAL LIFE, and more often than not, elements of that real life will be evident in fiction. We all have things that bother us. I personally find it juvenile that a grown adult would be so offended by curse words in a novel that this becomes an issue, but okay, if that’s your thing, that’s your thing. You don’t like swear words. Well, guess what? I don’t like the topic of addiction and drug overdose because I lost a family member that way. But am I going to demand a trigger label on every novel I pick up, warning me of such content? Am I going to demand that this be sanitized from my view in all forms of literature and entertainment? Hell, no! Why?

Because I’m a grownup. And it’s a story. And each story written and published and finding its way into your hands is exactly what the author meant for it to be. They draw on what they know to create characters and scenarios to form an experience for the reader. If you hated that experience for whatever reason, then yes, you’re within your rights to bitch about it or write a bad review. But you don’t get to clutch your pearls and instruct authors on what you do and don’t want to see within the pages. You don’t get to have a warning in advance in case something in the story hurts your feelings.

I’ve let this post bleed over into story content issues, but bringing it back to the Clean Reader App, let’s get real. Swear words are still just words. Remember the old ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?’ Yet people seem perfectly desensitized to the sticks and stones. I’ve seen readers complain about cursing in books that have brutal murders and violence in them…yet nothing about the brutal murders and violence seemed to offend, so I can’t help seeing this as some sort of adopted identity on the part of the reader–a bizarre attempt at elitism.

So if they use the Clean Reader App on their newest serial killer mystery they picked up…how would that look exactly? “Dagnabbit you ducking victim, hold still you fudging such and such so I can finish disemboweling you with this knife, gosh darn it!”

I don’t know. All I know is, I write books for grownups. I read books for grownups. And when I do, I choose to do so without training wheels, without trigger warnings, and if the books contains a lot of ‘F-bombs’? That’s how the fucking author meant for it to be experienced. And I, a grownup, can fucking handle it.