Thoughts on being #ActuallyAutistic: when I started writing THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROW I didn't know I was autistic, and didn't write Matt (the MC) as autistic. However, multiple autistic readers have told me Matt reads as autistic!

It's got me thinking about the nature of our conscious, creative choices, and how conscious they really are. That's obviously not some massive new insight into the writing process; the unconscious is a big part of doing creative work, after all.

In recent years I've mostly thought and talked about the unconscious in terms of internalized bigotry, though, and how racism/ableism/transphobia/misogyny/etc show up in our work without conscious intent, and working to excise those poisons from ourselves.

It's not that I haven't spent any energy thinking about how confronting internalized self-hatred clears the way for our true, unfettered selves to emerge from the hidden spaces where they've been confined. I've been thinking about and doing it for years.

But the POSITIVELY framed notion of our unknown, buried truths acting upon us and finding their way onto the page despite our lack of self-awareness and self-understanding...that feels like a new thought for me.

It seems that may be what happened with THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROW. I consciously thought of it as a book about a neurotypical character; at no point did I actively choose to make him autistic. But he is my most autobiographically inspired protagonist.

We unintentionally reveal aspects of our innermost selves in our work all the time, and I suppose it's...easier, almost, for readers to recognize them as unconscious reveals when they're obviously harmful. Internalized racism, for example.

And I understand this kind of thing isn't automatically perceived as easy-peasy or cut-and-dried; I'm talking about the messy intersection of authorial intent and evolving self-knowledge. Opinions will vary in a big way.

But maybe the unconscious things that appear in our work aren't limited to the parts of ourselves we don't want to acknowledge. Maybe some of them are things we'd gladly declare if we only knew they were there, buried under layers of self-ignorance.

Maybe when I wrote THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROW, what came out from my unconscious and onto the page was a kind of impregnable clarity. Maybe what I unknowingly expressed was my whole, true, #ActuallyAutistic self. That is a marvelous, healing thought.