Who's in Charge Here?

Today I mopped floors. This is one of my least-favorite activities, right up there with root canals and tax forms. But at least while the water swirled around the tile, my brain was free to swirl around as well. I found myself thinking about writing, which I needed to be doing (but not as much as I needed to scrub the floors <ugh>). A recent discussion on a writers' list addressed the old battle of "literary" versus "genre" fiction. I write genre fiction. I write to entertain. My novel, TIMEWARP, for example, is pure escapism, right? I mean, it involves time travel. How serious can that be? It's an entertaining romp into history, something that could never really happen. Which is why, when a very real and very serious social issue, bigotry and hate crimes, suddenly reared its ugly head in the middle of my manuscript, I tried to banish it back where it came from. There's nothing entertaining or escapist about the subject. After all, I was writing this book, wasn't I? I could just take a U-turn and head in another direction, right? I spent an anguished day or two trying to make the specter go away, to get back to that fun romp I'd been writing. But I realized that it belonged to the place and time, and the people who populated my fictional world. This was, after all, a mystery, a crime story, and this was the crime that fit. As much as I wanted it to just go away and let me have fun, it had to stay.

That's when I told my husband, "If I ever get TIMEWARP published, we'll have to move." It happened the other way around--we moved long before I decided to release the book. Now, of course, I have another dilemma. I'd love to launch this story in the place of its birth, complete with a party, catered with appropriate goodies and attended by the people who, perhaps unwittingly, helped me write it. But would they celebrate a book that might make people stop and think about their attitudes, or those of their ancestors? Or would they be offended by it all?  Would they rather I had kept romping along in a lighter vein, allowing them to escape into a happy place, or left the story safely tucked away on my hard drive?

Maybe one of these days I'll develop the courage to ask them ....