Josh Vogt is joining us today with his novel The Maids of Wrath. Here’s the publisher’s description:
After surviving employee orientation without destroying the city with her new powers, Dani is finally a bonafide Cleaner. Raring to get to work and save the world from Corruption, she’s given the critical assignment of…full-time tools training. After all, what good are magic mops or squeegees if she doesn’t know how to properly wield them against Scum? For now, she’s stuck in sparring matches where her pride is getting as bruised as her body.
Ben, her janitor friend and mentor, is also struggling with being sidelined as a “consultant” after the loss of his powers. His only consolation is having gained information that could help solve the mystery of his wife’s death on a Sewer run gone horribly wrong—the same event that temporarily trashed his sanity.
But when a maid goes berserk during a training session and tries to slaughter everyone with a feather duster, something is clearly afoul within the ranks of the Cleaners themselves.
Company procedure brooks no compromise: Identify and quarantine the source of the Corruption at all costs. But who cleans the Cleaners? Especially when further enraged outbreaks seem to occur at random?
As bodies begin to create quite the messy heap, it’s only a matter of time before the whole company is consumed by the madness—taking Dani and Ben down the drain with it.
What’s Josh’s favorite bit?
JOSH VOGT
Maintaining a Clean Image…
When I first came up with the idea of a corporation dedicated to upholding the virtues of Purity while defying Corruption, I tried to imagine just how far the company managers would take that policy.
If your company employs magically empowered janitors, maids, plumbers, and other sorts of sanitation workers, exactly how do you enforce a clean image? After all, they’re already devoted to cleaning up the messes nobody else wants to touch. What else can you do to ensure they don’t give the company a bad name? If their cleanliness is supernatural, what could they possibly do to befoul the corporate image?
Well, there’s a difference between having a clean body and a dirty mind. So what keeps a Cleaner from expressing themselves in ways that wouldn’t quite be agreeable to company policy?
A foul-filter.
That is the term I came up with for how the Cleaners censors its employees. Whenever anyone tries to say a “dirty” word, they are bleeped. They open their mouth and nothing comes out but static, in essence. And that list of dirty words is being updated on a daily basis. For instance, “picklehead” got added in Enter the Janitor, merely because it was used with ill intent. Hint: Never call your boss a picklehead.
The fun part is when new readers flip through the books (either Enter the Janitor or The Maids of Wrath) and point out the gobbledygook when someone tries to curse. I get to explain it’s on purpose and, for some reason, their eyes invariably light up. At the same time, several characters within the story aren’t exactly pleased by their inability to curse. So they are forever trying to find loopholes in order to properly express themselves.
And as a bit of a tease, in the third novel (The Dustpan Cometh) one main character, Ben, resorts to Shakespeare. When he is unable to use even the most common curses in the modern day, why not go back a bit? And wow, was Shakespeare creative with his insults and cures. Want a few examples?
Onion-eyed moldwarp?
Fool-born measle?
Earth-vexing flap-dragon?
There are whole websites devoted to Shakespeare’s curses. I would never have guessed, but am quite glad I found out. So one of my favorite elements in continuing this series is figuring out unique ways for characters to curse.
It’s just their way of asserting a bit of free will despite management oversight.
LINKS:
BIO:
Author and editor Josh Vogt’s work covers fantasy, science fiction, horror, humor, pulp, and more. His debut fantasy novel is Pathfinder Tales: Forge of Ashes, published alongside his urban fantasy series, The Cleaners, with Enter the Janitor and The Maids of Wrath. He’s an editor at Paizo, a Scribe Award finalist, and a member of both SFWA and the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. Find him at JRVogt.com or on Twitter @JRVogt.
