h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Should we be worried, Ed?

Are you secretly mining all the daft things we write in this place and putting them into a Great Novel? I demand a free copy!

Who can tell?

I have enough material for quite a lot of novels, actually. This is a result of having lived in a rooming house and a trailer park. Being at the reference desk of a public library was icing on the cake. I had a boss who threw ash trays when he was mad, but I could never use that in a novel because dozens of my former co-workers would recognize the inference. One of them described the boss this way: "He must be from another planet. He's fat, he smokes like a chimney, he gets angry until you expect him to explode, but he's never sick."

(And, as far as I know, he's still alive, and probably nearly 80. I'd need to wait a while longer before I used him as a character )

I find that, as Mark Twain observed, people don't know they've been in your stories. Either they haven't bothered to read them, or don't have that gift Robert Burns spoke of.