Dave Eggers

And then you look back on it and something has superseded it and now it looks a little embarrassing.

We did a lot of that.

And only, you know, just in the last 15 years or so, I'm much more interested in and invested in just the storytelling and just going as deep as I possibly can into the characters.

And especially in this case, where it's two that are just like entwined for 70 years.

But it's a really different place where I am now from where I started.

What's funny, my wife had to talk about this a lot because on a purely like living in the world level, if you base something on someone in your life and they know it, then it makes a very awkward interactions with your friend or your neighbor, your colleague or your relative.

So you get to the point where you're so determined to go far afield of anyone you know so that nobody is confused.

And if anything, you borrow, or I do borrow a few things from my own life.

Like I went to art school for a little bit and this guy went to art school.

So you borrow one or two things that you might know about.

but all the other secondary and tertiary characters and down to their names.

You get to the point where you know a thousand people in real life.

You can't use any of their names even.

You run out of names.

So these two are Cricket and Olympia, two names I've never known anyone in real life.

But it becomes a challenge because you do want to be able to just move through the world and not have anyone mistakenly think that they're in your book.

Has anyone mistakenly thought they were in your book?

Yeah, books, movies, for sure.

And it's always the person that you never had a moment's thought about.

Like, I know that elf character that you wrote in Lord of the Rings.