Kirstin Innes is not used to this.

Not used to talking about who she is and what she thinks. "It's very strange for me to be doing this," she says indicating the tape recorder in front of her as we sit in the bar upstairs at the CCA in Glasgow, "rather than setting up someone else to talk to you."

Innes, 34, grew up in Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, studied in Aberdeen and was lucky enough to begin reading adult novels just as that mid-1990s flowering of Scottish fiction - AL Kennedy, Janice Galloway et al - were getting into print. Now she has joined their ranks. She is a writer.

She can say that now without any fear of contradiction. Her debut novel Fishnet is about to make its appearance after all. The last time I saw her, though, she was doing PR for the Glasgow Film Festival.

Now it's her turn to talk. And she has much to talk about. Scottish country dancing, her plans for her new home in Lochwinnoch which she has just moved into with her partner the writer Alan Bissett. Oh and prostitution. We talk a lot about prostitution, its rights and wrongs.

That's because of Fishnet. The book is about many things. What happens when a family member goes missing and how that stains the lives of everyone who is left behind. The architecture of loneliness that is the modern-day business park. The highly-connected, lowly-paid state of working life in the 21st century. The nature of female friendship and motherhood. But inevitably it's the book's concern with sex work that will garner attention.

In some ways Fishnet is a plea for us to rethink how we look at sex workers, to examine how society polices their work. It's the result of extensive research, including interviews with women who sell sex. In many ways it was meeting them that piqued Innes's interest and made her examine her own ideas.

"I was writing for The List and they did their first ever Sex issue," she recalls, "and the editor sent me off to find women who work in 'edgy, sexy jobs'. One of the people I came back with was an escort and the editor wasn't really comfortable with me talking to her. But the escort's story stuck with me and what stuck with me - and I'm half-embarrassed to admit this now - is I thought I knew what prostitution meant. It surprised me that I was reading blogs by women who were articulate and intelligent and had made conscious choices. They weren't helpless victims.

"Everybody thinks they understand what the word prostitute means. It's this idea of victimhood, of badness and helplessness," she says. That was not what she found. "Laws are made without even talking to the people whose lives they are going to affect. We assume that these people are victims and it's a kindness to speak for them. That comes with pity. And if you're pitying somebody you can't really empathise with them."

It has taken her time to come to this viewpoint, she admits. "I was deep into the research and I was still flip-flopping about what my position on sex work was. I would go out for lunch with these brilliant, articulate women who are daring you to pity them and were running intellectual circles around me and I would come away thinking one thing. And then I'd go onto the forums where the punters rate escorts and some of the language was so misogynistic it would drive me right back again.

"Ultimately, though, I was looking at a lot of radical feminist writing about sex work and what bothered me is that you say you want to send a message saying women are not for sale in this country. Now, for a start, a lot of the women I spoke to would find that offensive. They would say we're not for sale. They're selling sexual services.

"Secondly, if you're going to send out that message that's fine. But the second that your message begins to actively harm sex workers' lives, that's a huge problem for me."

That is why she is worried about the current drive to introduce the "Swedish model" which makes it illegal to pay for sex - recently introduced in Northern Ireland - into Scotland.

"That always comes with this idea that we would be sending out a strong signal that this is a feminist country; that women are not for sale. Sweden has had it for well over ten years and they can point to statistics that show sex work has gone down.

"But the sex industry there has just gone deeply, deeply underground, which makes it an incredibly dangerous place for people to work."

The thing is, she says, sex work is not going to go away. You cannot legislate it out of existence. So what would she suggest then as an alternative? "I think the best way to deal with it, the most feminist way, is to completely legalise it and then introduce regulations that are going to make these women's lives better. And it's not just women. There are male sex workers too."

Instead of Sweden, she says we should be looking to New Zealand where sex workers have rights enshrined in law following legislation introduced near the start of the century after consultation with sex workers. The Northern Irish legislation was introduced despite the fact that more than 90 per cent of sex workers surveyed were opposed to the legislation.

She is angry about the fact that two women working in a flat together is called a brothel and therefore illegal. "They can't work together for their own safety which does strike me as crazy. Sorry for the rant."

This is a complex, difficult subject of course. There are huge issues surrounding the question of sex trafficking and violence towards sex workers and there are many who argue that the criminalisation of those who use prostitutes is the only way forward. Innes argues, though, that New Zealand has one of the lowest rates of human trafficking in the world.

A recent UK survey has discovered that more than 70 per cent of UK sex workers - none of whom had been trafficked or coerced into sex work - have previously worked in healthcare, education or charities, while more than a third hold university degrees. One wonders how much of an impact UK's poverty wage economy has had on the area? "It's a question about respecting labour. This labour," says Innes.

Here speaks Innes the advocate. But that role has been some time coming. When she finished her first draft of her debut novel back in 2011 Innes stuck it in a drawer and didn't look at it for a year. Even though it was nominated for a Mslexia prize, she couldn't bring herself to read it or have anyone else read. "I was terrified of showing it to anybody." She also wasn't sure she had the right to write about the subject. Eventually her partner reminded her that the women she spoke to had given her their time. She owed them something in return.

Now that Fishnet is about to appear she can get on with other work. A Creative Scotland artist bursary will allow her to put the PR work aside and work on her second novel as well as a play about Scottish country dancing, which will look at the life of Miss Jean Milligan who formed the Royal Scottish Dancing Society and was head of PE at Jordanhill, "so she trained every single PE teacher and their first set of PE curriculum which is why we all do Scottish country dancing."

But for the moment she is waiting for publication day for Fishnet with a sense of excitement and maybe a touch of nerves.

"This was the book that wanted to be written, and I knew going in that if I was going to take on this issue with any level of responsibility about it, I'd have to allow that issue to take centre stage rather than me and my writing career."

Fishnet is published by Freight Books, priced £8.99, next Monday.