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I write about scoundrels; my specialty is generally scoundrels. If somebody's done a bad thing, I just talk about it. I don't prettify it or anything. My characters, a lot of them are disgusting _ what they've done in the past. Somebody described them once as "last-ditch attempts at justification." And sometimes that's what my characters or my personae are doing: they're saying, "Yes, I did this and that thing, and perhaps it was evil. It was bad _ maybe it wasn't even evil _ but this is why I did it. You don't know the circumstances surrounding it." And this is the telling; they're almost retelling what happened from their point of view .... I use "bad words" whenever I feel the need, you know, I just put 'em in there _ if it's true to my character. I always like to think that I'm doing things that are true to my charcter. And I hope that, when I'm dealing with violence, for example, that it's not gratuitous, that it's coming out of character that requires that .... I usually start with character, rather than a concept or an idea. If I do want to deal with an idea, I must create a character, in order to work from there, from that angle.