People sometimes ask how I can possibly condone the terrible things I write about.  And of course the answer is that I absolutely DON’T - in real life.  But this is fiction.  

Ah, you say, but people believe it really happened - at least in “Asha has been Taken”.  To which I say “Thanks!”  I take it as a tribute to my (admittedly not large) writerly skills.

To my mind the question is whether any “real people” were harmed in the making of this book - to which the answer is obviously “no”.  A trickier question is whether people reading it will take it as an excuse to do the same things in real life.  And there is something to that: politicians do TRULY terrible things to large numbers of people, based on their reading of some documents.  Ditto religious organizations throughout history.

My own sense is that, if someone is disposed to do harm to others, my writing probably isn’t telling them something they haven’t thought of already.  (Though hopefully I do it in an engaging, sexy way!)

What do YOU think?