First, I’d like to say that it’s Eli Monpress week over at Mel’s Random Reviews! This was entirely her own idea and I was flattered to take part. You can read reviews of the first three books plus an interview with me and a very swoon worthy meme about Eli, book boyfriend. All in all, very well done, and you really should check it out! – R

The other day I received the following question on Twitter “why did you add more “offensive” language from each Eli book instead of leaving it younger audience friendly?”

To say this threw me for a loop would be, as Eli would say, the bedrock of understatement. See, I go out of my way to try and keep the language in my books as clean as possible. This doesn’t mean the books are prudish (well, Miranda might be, but no one who’s spent one chapter with Eli Monpress could ever accuse him of being puritan), it just means that I steer clear of the sort of extreme violence, language, and gore that you find in darker fantasies. This isn’t to say I don’t have violence or unpleasant circumstances, I just don’t roll around in them. I leave that to Joe Abercrombie, who does it much, much better than I ever could.

As I explained to The Write Thing a while ago, keeping my books clean wasn’t a decision I took lightly. It all came down to readership. The long and short of it was that, while the Eli Monpress books are written for adults, with adult themes like paying the price for chasing your dreams, how not all love is healthy, and what it actually means to be uncompromising, I still wanted the series to be accessible to everyone no matter their age or who was censoring their reading. I didn’t want someone who could enjoy my work to turn away just because of stupid language choices.

But (as most authors will tell you) sometimes there’s only one right word, and when that word happens to be a word you can’t say on network television, the time comes to make an executive decision. For those of you wondering what word I’m talking about, the obscenity in question is bitch, and the person it was applied to was Benehime.  Now, if you’ve read my books (and if you haven’t, it’s not exactly a spoiler), you know that Benehime is, in fact, a bitch. And when you get to read The Spirit War and Spirit’s End next year, you’ll be amazed by my restraint at only calling her bitch and not… other things I’ll refrain from saying here because my mother reads this blog. But yes, in Spirit Eater, Benehime is called a bitch, and very rightly so. So rightly so, in fact, that I’d actually forgotten I’d used the word until this question reminded me.

In all fairness to my poor reader, he was listening to the audio version, and after two books of straight up PG reading, the bitch can hit you out of nowhere (as bitches are want to do). While I am sorry the word came without warning, I’m not sorry I wrote it. It was the right word, the only word to use in that particular instance. Far more interesting than the actual bitch, though, was why I felt the need to break my cursing ban in the first place.

Like any series that takes its characters seriously, the Legend of Eli Monpress gets darker as it goes along. The Spirit Thief is exactly what the title suggests, a light hearted book about a glib thief who gets in over his head and has to charm his way out. But while Eli, the thief in question and main character of the series to which he’s so graciously lent his name, is a happy-go-lucky person by nature, his past isn’t the kind of thing anyone but Eli could take lightly. The pressure on the characters goes up with every book. The stakes get higher, the enemies more dangerous, and Eli and his crew get pushed closer and closer to their limits. In fact, in The Spirit War, several people get pushed well over their limits. It’s not happy times, and while Eli is still his charming, irrepressible self, we’re not stealing kings anymore.

I’m not saying the series suddenly goes into dark fantasy territory, but as things get more serious, the language changes to match. Trust me, though, it doesn’t get any worse than bitch. We’re still solidly PG, and unless you’re actually listening for it, you probably wouldn’t even notice. It’s more the feel of the books that changes as the characters are forced to grow up and face the consequences of their actions. Even Eli can’t run forever.

Chances are, if a kid is old enough to read at a level where they can enjoy my books, they’re not going to find any language they haven’t heard before. But again, these are not YA books. They’re written for adults, and if you wouldn’t want your child reading this blog post, chances are you shouldn’t let them read my series past Spirit Rebellion. You probably shouldn’t let them read about Josef chopping someone’s arm off either, but that’s another kettle of fish all together.