It’s campaign season and it’s killing me. In “real life” I’m a very opinionated person—just ask my friends and family. I can fulminate with the best of them and I have very definite political beliefs. All of which I have to leave at the door when I become Romance Writer.

When I taught at Enormous State University, I was always careful to keep my political opinions to myself. I didn’t want my students, many of whom held political opinions that were radically different from mine, to feel that they were in any danger of being persecuted for their beliefs. This was easier for me than for some of my colleagues since I taught things like document design and Web writing, where the subject of politics rarely came up (my friends in the history department were more hard pressed). Even so, I worked to keep my own opinions in the background. I knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of teacher prejudice more than once (when I was a kid, one teacher ridiculed me in front of my homeroom class for having a book about dinosaurs, which obviously meant I believed in (gasp) evolution).

Now as a novelist I’m in a somewhat similar position. I don’t want to limit myself to any particular group of readers, and I don’t want to exclude anyone from my books if I can help it. I’ve had some people complain about the sex scenes in my books, and I can’t do much about that (or anyway, I don’t intend to). Others have complained that my characters take the Lord’s Name in vain, and again I’m not going to change that since I want my dialogue to sound the way most people talk. But I try not to make my characters reflect any particular political agenda because as a reader I’ve been annoyed when authors did that. Some authors, like Jane Haddam, can get by with having political discussions in their work, but most of us can’t do it. I’ve found myself exasperated by characters in romance novels who suddenly start preaching about a particular social philosophy, and even more exasperated if the author inserts a hateful or absurd character who happens to share my own social philosophy. I abandoned one popular series when the author went out of her way to slam some political programs I happen to believe in. And that, of course, is the danger: when you step up on a soapbox, you risk alienating all the readers who don’t agree with you.

But my beliefs do show up in my books. My characters share my values—how could they not? When they stand up for something or against something, they’re reflecting my own ideas. So my leanings aren’t exactly a secret, even though they may not be blatantly expressed in my writing.

Still, at times like these I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut. Every day I hear things that I find outrageous and wrong. I’m longing to say something about it on Twitter or Facebook or MySpace, or to write a really blistering blog piece about the stuff that’s in the wind. But I won’t. Or anyway, I don’t think I will. The sound you hear is me, gritting my teeth so hard it hurts.