Hey folks,

My next novel, the postmodern mystery-comedy A Dark Hole Darkly, is out August 25th. (I may have mentioned that before!) And you can pre-order the paperback now from Bookshop.org and elsewhere.

This book is absolutely the most personal thing I’ve written. (Or, well, published at least. I’ve written some truly soul-searing grocery lists.) And, anyway, it got me thinking about that Writing 101 truism, “Write what you know.”

It’s a good piece of advice, because it’s both suggestion (“Can’t think of what to write about? Write about something you know about?”) and warning (“Um. Maybe you shouldn’t be writing about that thing you know nothing about???”), but it absolutely means different things to different people.

Like, what constitutes “knowing”? Does that just mean things that happened to you personally? In which case, who is qualified to write about all of the spaceships??? Or elves??? Or, hear me out:

Spaceships that are also elves?

No? No. Nevermind. Elves shouldn’t be spaceships probably.

There’s a comfortable reading of “Write what you know” that’s basically “Write the stuff you read about a lot” or, if we want to be slightly less derivative, “Write stuff that’s weird and original in line with the sort of weird and original stuff you like”.

But there’s another, maybe more conservative reading that’s basically “Write about your immediate friends and family, but change all their names so they (maybe) won’t get mad.”

I don’t know how many people actually do this, but in my experience at least, exactly ALL people I’ve ever met think that this is what writing is all. the. time.

It’s always, “So which character is based on me?” or “I bet THIS is going to make it into one of your books!”

And as long as I’m writing about a swashbuckling accountant in the 201st century, I can kind of roll my eyes at that stuff and say things like, “NO, Larry, you were not the inspiration for that time-traveling squid. Obviously.”

(Whether he was or not.)

But A Dark Hole Darkly is set firmly in the here-and-now. Or. Well. In 2002.

And it features a character who’s neurodivergent like me, and it draws on a lot of my lived experience. And maybe that character knows people who bare some resemblance to people that I know. Maybe. For legal purposes definitely NO. But, not-legally? Maybe.

So when my wife asks, “Is this woman supposed to be me?” I can honestly say, “No, Laura. The main character’s girlfriend is named Lilly, which is a totally different L-name.”

But also there are going to be way more things in this one where SOME people WILL be able to say, “Wait, I remember when something like this happened and I said, ‘I bet THIS is going to make it into one of your books!’”

“And?” I’ll say.

“And you said some non-sequitur shit about me not being a squid!!!”

What I’m saying is: New book. Very personal. Very excited. And a LITTLE worried that Larry-the-Squid is gonna come for me.

The New Outrage drops August 25th.