When you create a fictional character, you control that character’s story life–but you have no control over what happens to her once the story is out in the world.

The heroine of my first novel, Katsuren, is a young American archeologist with long blonde hair on an island where the women are all brunettes. As one way of calling attention to her appearance without actually screaming “Look! She has long blonde hair!” I put in a scene where she is moving into a hotel room and hanging her own,terry-lined shower cap on the bathroom door because the dinky plastic ones provided by hotels don’t work for her.

This is not a major scene. But it was picked up and put out on the Internet as an advertisement for someone’s line of bath products.

My character went to Okinawa to find herself as a newly-fledged archeologist, and now she is entering a second career as an Internet huckster.

Fate is funny, fate is weird.