Paranoia

As the writer of The PriVILEged, I knew that paranoia would drive the story but I didn't realize just how much until I began writing about what it must be like to be innocent children, devilish priests, and covert bishops inside of pristine confessionals while committing heinous sexual acts.

Whenever I sat down to write for the day, I'd think about a priest and his thoughts surrounding "preying" on children, I found it interesting as a treatment provider of sex offenders that I had absolutely no desire to defend the perpetrator in this story. Instead, I would be taking the side of the victim for two reasons. First, my experiences working with victim advocates typically fell short of my expectations due to the amount of rescuing and enabling that advocates so often do with a kind of fabricated empathy that did little more than to create a scenario of "I hope the victim likes me because I, too, can't handle further victimization." 

My decision to write from the victim advocate point of view would be done for the sole purpose of doing everything I could to give Matty and the other children a voice inside a church that historically shuts down child and adult victims of sexual abuse.

I would be pleasantly surprised in the end with how cathartic this choice was considering that in my home state of Colorado we have a Sex Offender Management Board who decided six or so years ago that an adult sex offender cannot be "cured." This decision permitted me to write The PriVILEged using a narrator with a definitive objective that the only way to resolve this situation involving pedophilic priests was through the use of assassination and not shipping them Around The World pretending the problem didn't exist.

I'll leave it to you to decide if I was able to use paranoia as an effective instrument to tell a story about The PriVILEged and how you see victim advocacy. Just don't be surprised if you feel paranoid when reading because I believe this is how the children feel all the time.