My stories have villains, of course. I won a blog contest for best betrayal of a villain in my book Singing in Babylon. While portraying the villain’s evil intentions, I attempted to trace the reasons for his choice of evil. The villain chose unwisely after a wrong done to his family. A commendable trait, loyalty to family, became evil through the way he dealt with it.

Sometimes the villain is internal. Kaitlin Sadler’s early life was torn apart by tragedy in A Sense of Mission. Though she finds healing within the love of those around her, she struggles through the next few years with the inability to enjoy life to the fullest, sapped by the fear of evil that seems stronger than life. Kaitlin finally chooses to sacrifice fear for faith when she risks a new calling.

Fiction allows us to wrestle with evil through the lives of characters caught in its grip. The greatest stories give us hope that evil can be defeated through good. The recent movie version of Les Miserables depicts the thief, Jean Valjean, forever changed through one act of kindness. The kindness required sacrifice on the part of the benefactor. To turn evil to good may require such sacrifice, a giving up of possessions or of some part of the self.