■ When I was signing with my agent, I remember having a brief conversation with my husband: Should I use my real name or should I use a pen name? I truly had this very flawed idea that you just write a book and it goes out there and no one really cares who the person is behind it. And that’s absolutely not true. People care a lot. That’s been a surprising thing to navigate.

■ It’s a very common fear when you write fiction that you’re going out naked into the world with your whole self on display, because everyone’s going to assume it must be autobiographical. With Remarkably Bright Creatures, I almost deliberately avoided having a character who looked like me. But the joke’s on me, because even if the character is a completely different generation, different gender, you can’t get around it.

■ A nice card will arrive at my house from some really nice person who has taken the time to handwrite a note about my book, and it’s so sweet. But then part of me is like, How did you find me?

■ I have tried so many times to become a regimented 5 a.m. writer. I have finally accepted that my brain does not work that way. I will sort of catch the vibe, so I tend to go in bursts. It will pour out of me sometimes for several hours. And then I have to take a break for a couple of days. It’s like a writing hangover.

■ When I really get into a flow state, time doesn’t exist. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s been 30 minutes or three hours. I once had a bag of chips sitting next to me, and I looked over and it was empty. I did not remember eating any of them: 1,800 calories’ worth of potato chips, and didn’t enjoy any of it.

■ I almost always have my earbuds in when I’m drafting. My only rule is it has to be music I know well; I can’t listen to something new when I’m writing. This is silly, but I picture the unhelpful part of my brain having a sing-along in the back of my skull. It’s like, It’s distracted, now I can get to work.

■ Occasionally I will send a short story under a pen name to a random and usually nonpaying lit magazine, just to see. It almost always gets rejected.

■ Throughout my 20s and early 30s, I ran 13 marathons. I was fast enough to qualify for Boston in 2013. We have friends who had a second-floor apartment on Boylston Street, where the marathon finishes, so they had a watch party. I crossed the finish line a couple minutes before the first bomb went off. The second was near a trashcan right in front of their apartment. I had run by it. My husband had come down to cheer me on. I had gone over and given him a high-five. He was literally leaning up against that trashcan. Right when he got back upstairs, the thing exploded.

■ I know there will be people who aren’t going to like my next book as much as the first. It could be the best book in the world, and there will be, I guarantee, a contingent of people who say, “Well, it’s OK, but I really wish there was an octopus.” And I’m kind of like, I wish there was, too. I get it. But I need to move on. I need to grow as a writer. Marcellus is always going to be there in the first book, but I need to see what I can do without him.