Four years ago I went to Mount Hermon Writers Conference and came home bemoaning the fact that I would never publish in the CBA. The buzzword that year had been edgy. I knew I would never be edgy.

I still remember how horrified I was when Dr. Dudley Delffs (now with Zondervan, then with WaterBrook) told us about a proposal that grabbed him. Trying to illustrate how a good hook works, he told us about the proposal. A woman minister wanted to marry but all the men she knew were intimidated by her job. So…here’s the hook…

“she had a makeover and she went from holy to hottie in just one week.” *

I was feeling pretty defeated when I heard that. I didn’t care to read books with female pastors, even, let alone ones with hotties standing up there behind the sacred desk. I was a dinosaur. Totally out of touch with the young editors in the CBA.

I had a book with a nice little Christian boy for a protagonist. My characters didn’t have New York attitudes. They didn’t hate their little brothers and sisters. They didn’t talk back to their parents. They were too sweet for the CBA. Everyone was talking about realistic, gritty fiction. They wanted manuscripts that pushed the envelope.

Fast forward four years.

March 2008, Mount Hermon:

Sally trips off to California with her hot little manuscript in her hands. And I do mean hot. This one about a poor, but beautiful, girl sold into slavery. And what kind of slaves do beautiful girls make? Sex slave.

I didn’t plan it this way. I didn’t go home from the 2004 conference determined to come up with a gritty novel. I went home trying to think of a big concept. I went home trying to think of a fresh world and a fresh protagonist. And I, the one who doesn’t read romance and never wanted to write a girly book, dreamed up a fairy tale/romance starring a sex slave.

I figured that the teen girls in my prayer group at church and my own niece and daughter are swamped with sex in our present culture. And the way the culture presents it is a perversion of marital sex, that good gift from God. So, since the teens all know about sex and are all under pressure to engage in sex, perhaps someone should write about it from a Christian worldview.

I thought a fantasy world would be a nonthreatening place in which to treat the subject. And I thought sex was allowable in YA CBA books. I mean in any given month there’s a good chance that the books at the top of the YA Christian bestseller list are about sex. Parents, it seems, understand that their kids are facing a huge battle with this right now.

My book is not nonfiction, though. It’s a novel. So it’s not really a lesson all laid out. And there are some mean characters in there and they do and say mean and ugly things. But there is a purpose to the book. I’m not simply showcasing perversion for the fun of it. I’m trying to compare a few things. There are lowborns and overlords. There is the hot, humid swamp at the bottom of the mountain and the crisp ice city at the top of the mountain. And in that landscape I explore the differences between contentment and apathy, lust and love, and greed and a proper desire for quality of life.

But mostly this book is a love story. A story of self-sacrifice. Of failing and forgiveness. The main character is strong and strong-willed. Foolish on the road to wisdom. Much like teen girls are today–idealistic and selfish bundles of contradictions. And she needs to grieve a little and grow a lot.

So here I am, the most un-edgy, sexually straight of Christian women, being gently rebuked by some in the CBA for being too gritty.

More on this topic after the blog tour is done next week.

* To be clear about Dr. Delffs’ intentions: He was not remarking on the propriety of female pastors or agreeing that if we have female pastors they should be hotties. He was doing his job. Teaching. Making a point about hooks. His illustration was hugely effective. The juxtaposition of the two dissimilar things, holy and hottie, made for an intriguing and memorable hook.

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