It’s Election Day here in the United States and as usual, our sanity checks have been failed.

I don’t write about politics because, well, it really doesn’t interest me. Not the running of our country or anything, no, that interests me plenty. It’s the “debating” part and the “bipartisan” congress and politicians who don’t interest me.

When I was teaching way back when, a few of my students asked me who I was going to vote for. I told them that I probably wasn’t going to vote for president, but I was voting for congress. They looked at me funny and said I “couldn’t do that”. I asked why and they told me that their parents told them that Bush II was evil and trying to turn our country into a “Bible-thumping, grandstanding oligarchy”.

I remembered that phrase because I was dealing with three students who regularly slept through class and I knew that the phrase had been imprinted into their heads by parents. I wish they had been imprinted with the desire to stay awake during class or, better still, finished their homework on-time.

When I write, I try to avoid politics as much as possible. Oh sure, I’ll have a passing mention of something or another, but all in all I try to keep the political junk off book. I mean, we’re already inundated with politics and the b.s. that goes with it on a daily basis here, so why in the world would I bury a good story with my own political ideals? People don’t want to be lectured to when they read my stuff, they want to be entertained. Most fiction readers, to me, just want to be entertained. Is that so hard to do?

Apparently so.

Now with some authors, you know you’re going to be getting some politics in their writing. It’s their nature and they can’t help it. It’s when other writers go out there to make a political statement is when I absolutely flip my lid.

“They want to be entertained!” I’ll scream at some poor soul while on a panel at a convention. “These people do not care about how the political realities of our country are subjugating and stereotyping women! They want to escape from this crap and just relax! The hell is wrong with you?”

I’ll admit, I went over the top at that panel. But after listening to a self-righteous feminist go on about the moral superiority of a raped woman and how it totally relates to her latest work-in-progress… *sigh*

So don’t worry, not very often will you have to worry about running into politics in any of my books. I’d be more worried about the female characters I write about putting a bullet into a favorite character’s cranium.

Oh, today’s post? Brought to you by the letter “S”.

“S” is for “Stupid”, that’s good enough for me.