Writer Commentary Track: Reality is Weird
by Mike Maillaro (July 23, 2026)
When I sat down to start working on my writer commentary tracks, I assumed the first thing I would write about was where The Story of You came from. That would have made sense.
Instead, I decided to start with the fact that reality is broken. It seemed important to mention that.
I was fortunate to have some wonderful friends who helped read early versions of The Story of You and made invaluable suggestions and edits that made my writing so much better.
But one thing I found funny was that their notes were often concerned about things being "unrealistic", and those concerns were almost always tied to things that were actually real.
My wife was convinced I had invented a dairy farm in Yellow Springs that somehow had batting cages, miniature golf, a petting zoo, and an ice cream parlor, and she was genuinely annoyed that it made no sense. I hadn't invented a thing. I had to show her the website! I had carefully researched that place, and just about everything I wrote set there was based on the pictures and reviews from their site. The biggest thing I actually made up was Ethan winning a Lion King plushie.
My friend Amy questioned Strawberry Twizzler milkshakes and Joe Hendry… both 100% real. Though to be fair, those of us who know Joe Hendry (clap clap) are probably wrestling fans, so we are already a little weird.
There is a lot I made up for this book. I’ve certainly never been on a major promotional book tour. Maya is practically from another planet most of the time. Nobody questioned Ethan somehow becoming one of the biggest authors in America. Nobody seemed bothered that a bestselling romantasy writer would hire a woman he met working at an Iowa gas station to be his assistant. And Queenie is supernatural, I’m pretty sure. Nobody questioned any of those things! But the things that were real? That’s where I got the most questions. There is a lot of truth to the idea that reality is often stranger than fiction.
And then there was when I discovered a real Ethan Crump.
I knew from the beginning that Ethan Blackwood was my character's pen name, and he needed an awkward real name. After a bunch of variations, I settled on Crump and was happy with that.
Then one day at random, I got CC’d on an email for work. The original email was from someone named Ethan Crump.
To be honest, this sent me into a spiral. I have to change my character's name! There is no way anyone would ever believe this was a coincidence! It had taken me so long to settle on Crump, but it felt like it had to go.
After several names I hated, my wife suggested I just go with Krump, a simple Find & Replace (which did also change the word “crumpled” to “krumpled” which I did not notice until much later on). But every time I typed the name after that, I kept going back to Crump. So I just decided: screw it, we're sticking with Crump.
A few years ago, my friend Ward ran a year-long Delta Green RPG campaign for our group. Delta Green is built around the idea that reality is fragile, full of cracks, and that once you've seen behind the curtain, you can't ever quite look at the world the same way again.
Ever since that campaign, every single person who played in it has independently reported noticing just how messy reality actually is.
Coincidences stop being coincidences. The weird stuff starts piling up. You begin telling people completely true stories, and they insist you must have made them up. A fictional character shows up in your work email.
So either Ward permanently damaged all of our brains...or we're all living in The Matrix.
At this time, no other possible explanations will be entertained.