I redid The Navigators recently.

I took out the swear words and the sex scenes.

There were a LOT of swear words. Like, the F word appeared 50 (okay, 70) times! And a lot of other swear words appeared almost as much. I had a collage-age character who cussed a lot, and his friends cussed when they got excited.

I wrote it that way because I cussed a lot at that age. A friend read it recently and said it would probably sell better without all the swear words. I shrugged off her advice – for a while – but it was in the back of my head, taunting me.

Then I watched some movies.

Star Wars has very little cussing.

Harry Potter has very little cussing.

Jurassic Park has very little cussing.

Hmm.

Most of my favorite movies have very little cussing (although Goodfellas makes up for what Jurassic…