My book, 'Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda,' is a gay love story. It's also a story about friendship. Quite honestly, it's also probably a 320-page product placement for Oreos.

And sometimes that's just what happens. People grow apart.

You can't just like Harry Potter. You have to be balls-out obsessed with it.

'Simon' was always a word-of-mouth book. When it came out in 2015, I don't know that anybody thought that 'Simon' could be mainstream. Publisher Harper Collins loved it in-house, but it wasn't a lead title. Nobody is more surprised than me that it's a film. It's the little book that could.

From a plot perspective, what I finally found for my touchstone was that I consider 'Upside' to be a loose telling of Jane Austen's 'Emma,' or 'Clueless.'