If you follow our comments (each to his own taste) you’ll have noted an exchange following Phil’s “Questions” post, in which I talk about my personal emotional problem with shame. It’s an awkward sort of conversation, as I no doubt appear partly self-pitying and partly just perverse, responding to everything with a one-size-fits-all, “That makes me feel ashamed.” Although I can see how it might look as if I was playing a game, let me assure you that I’m dead serious. That’s what it’s like to have a shame problem. Whatever you think about anything, good or bad, helpful or worthless, shame is always there, in some different form. It’s a ubiquitous, protean enemy.

Thinking about it this evening, it occurred to me that that would make a great theme for a fantasy story. I could have a villain who was a shape-changer, who follows the hero wherever he goes, and confronts him again and again in different disguises.

And then I realized, with a shock, that I’d already written that story. My new book (which, in case you’ve forgotten, is called West Oversea) features a villain who’s a shape-changer. He follows Erling Skjalgsson wherever he goes, even in a voyage to North America, and confronts him again and again in a variety of disguises.

I wrote an allegory on my own condition, and didn’t even realize it.

I’ll figure out a way to feel ashamed of that, too….