Recently, a reader wanted to know had I ever written an “unexpected scene” and did it stay in the book? The answer is yes, and yes, it stayed in the book and was published; and yes, but the book hasn’t been published yet, so that scene’s fate is still up in the air.

In the first instance, if you’ve read any of my books, you know one of my protagonists, Mai Fisher, tries to maintain a personal code of conduct in her espionage work. Oh, she’ll lie, manipulate, blackmail, or threaten as often as she needs to, but she has two lines she swore never to cross: She won’t use sex to accomplish a mission, and she won’t kill in cold blood, only self-defense.

Like those of us who entered a male-dominated workforce in the 1970s, Mai was subject to misogyny and sexual harassment. One of the great things about writing fiction, I can have her handle it way better than I did in my youth, but after experiencing this, Mai vowed she wouldn’t work the way people thought she should, i.e., she’d use her brain over her body.

Though she works in a world of occasional violence (not nearly at the level you see in a Bond or Bourne movie), she is also the daughter of two spies who were murdered when she was five years old. She vowed never to be an assassin, to kill in cold blood.

Both high ideals, ones her partner, Alexei Bukharin, thought were a bit naive, but he indulged her because they were able to accomplish their work without her resorting to them. However, I was determined to write these two characters as “real spies with real lives.” In reality, as we accumulate experience in life, ideals that we set for ourselves fall by the wayside. It was only natural with Mai’s character that she “evolve” in her work; otherwise, the realism I strove for wasn’t authentic.

In books 3 and 4 of my series A Perfect Hatred, Mai almost sets one ideal aside and definitely drops the other.

In book 3 of A Perfect Hatred, Descending Spiral, she knows she’s reached a good level of trust between her and her subject, but not enough for her him to tell her details about the act of terror he’s plotting. She knows he has feelings for her, and when the information she wants isn’t forthcoming, she decides to exploit them. Because she and Alexei are estranged at this point (another unexpected scene), she makes it clear what she wants.

And then, someone interrupts, and everyone’s virtue remains more or less intact.

The unexpected part of that scene was that she decided she’d sleep with her subject for a couple of reasons: One, she was desperate to obtain the intel she needed, and two, she wanted to give Alexei a dose of his own medicine. However, one thing Mai has never been is petty, and she’s glad for the interruption.

So, one ideal stays in place.

However, in book 4, Collateral Damage, after she and Alexei fail to stop this act of terror, Mai is at the lowest point of her career performance–in her eyes. I had written a pretty dramatic scene where Alexei discovers her with a gun to her head, but I realized I hadn’t set that up enough. I hadn’t provided a sufficient reason for her to consider suicide. So, here came the unexpected scene.

In her sense of failure, she displaces the blame from the terrorist to a person whom she decides was responsible for creating the terrorist. And she kills him. In cold blood. She puts that out of mind until something triggers the memory, and she thinks she can’t live with the knowledge that she abandoned that principle. Cue the scene of Alexei finding her with a gun to her head and stopping her.

Those were the unexpected scenes that were published. Now, let’s discuss the one that’s still up in the air.

In a series with the working title Enemies Domestic, I cover issues we’ve dealt with as a nation for the past decade or so. When Mai discovers that Neo-Nazis are ensconced in the White House as presidential advisors, she decides that the one at the highest level needs to be taught a lesson. The man is also a Holocaust denier, and Mai designs the perfect “history lesson” for him, which takes place at a World War II Nazi concentration camp–not a real one, a fictional one I created from bits and pieces of real ones.

That’s definitely an unexpected scene. I surprised myself with its intensity, though I understand it emerged from my deepest fears and highest anger. I’ve wavered between it’s being necessary or being over-the-top insensitive. As I said, wavering. The specific book is two to three years away from publication, and I’m going to employ sensitivity readers as well as beta readers. We’ll see. I’ve never been one to step away from the controversial in my writing, and I’m always focused on authenticity. Sometimes, however, a scene may be best deleted.

I’ve got plenty of time to ponder whether that unexpected scene will be published.

But I think I know which way it will go.