A short aside... recently someone has been posting on a blog about how Joss Whedon's Firefly is chauvanist male propaganda and that Joss himself (who is regarded by many sane feminists to be a strong supporter of the feminist movement) is an evil woman hater. She cites examples in the text that 'prove' this to be so. Her argument has been roundly ripped apart by many... however, one point I made about this is that a writer is not their character. Elements of your personality may end up in characters you write but they are not you. What they do is not what you would do in that situation. Agatha Christie was not a murderer because she wrote about murderers, David Starkey (famous historian who writes a lot about the Tudor monarchy) is not an overweight, aldulterous, serial monogamist because he wrote a book about Henry VIII.

Fiction is fiction and stays fiction in the majority of cases (barring one or two rather deranged individuals who take things too far in emulating heroes from books or TV that the media tend to over emphasise...).

Sometimes fiction is a dark mirror of reality, often it is a cautionary tale - what would happen to you if you did... whatever? The story tells you what is likely to happen so that a) you don't have to actually do it and b) you are warned about the serious consequences. IN fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this is how we have always used stories - ever since the times of early man. We, as a species, have always told 'what if' stories in our minds and later wrote them down. Some of these are simple 'What if I ran at that gazelle with a spear? Would the lion that is also stalking it get me first or am I fast enough to beat it?' Answering that question successfully, building an effective model of the future, became an important survival trait and so story became an important part of life and human evolution. Other stories are more complex, these predictions of the future then developed into fiction.

But I digress... my point is that it is good to be scared. Being scared means that you are testing limits of imagination, bending some rules and therefore making something more creative than if you played it safe. If you have that 'Oh god' feeling, it means you are onto a winner because controversy sells stories... look at Salmon Rushdie and tell me that annoying the Ayatollah and putting his life in danger did not help sell his book...