I was talking to someone the other day about the main characters in my novels, and the word promiscuous came up. The person I was chatting with didn't use the word in an unkind or accusing way — I think she just thought it was an apt label for women who like sex and who have more than one sexual partner.

My characters do like sex, they do have more than one sexual partner over the time frames covered in my books, and they both refer to past lovers. But I would never use the word promiscuous for either of them.

Promiscuous is defined as 1. Consisting of diverse and unrelated parts or individuals; confused. 2. Lacking standards of selection; indiscriminate. 3. Indiscriminate in sexual relations. 4. Casual; random. The word comes from the Latin prōmiscuus, mixed thoroughly, based on prō (intensifier) + miscēre (to mix).

I can agree that my characters are diverse in their sexual tastes, and that they "mixed thoroughly" with lovers and the world. But that's it.

The next word in the dictionary after promiscuous is promise, and that's the word I choose to apply to my women characters. Promise has a different etymology than promiscuous, but for my characters, it's not unrelated — especially when I consider Suzanne in my new novel Thief. She sees the promise in the men she has sex with. In Chapter 20, she says:

"It wasn't that I thought every lay was love....At the moment I picked a man, he was not troubled, not rough traffic, not just the embodiment of animal magnetism and sexual attraction. At the moment I picked a man, he held all possibility, all eloquent potential."

I think some people will say Suzanne makes "bad choices," and I know others will be less kind in how they describe her. But to me she's hopeful, open to her body and the world.

She doesn't have a permanent lover. She's a rover. Nomadic in her sexuality.