Dear Prudence,
I am a married, straight-ish woman, with a fantastic job in a slightly niche field where people normally stay in a position for their entire career. I have been writing a novel (slowly, for fun) in my spare time, about a gay (male) couple that meets in the training phase of my career track (e.g., as paralegals). It’s a romance and a (humorous, I hope!) critique of the industry, it has some NSFW scenes, and it is entirely fictional. At the rate I’m going, I’ll probably finish it in about a year.
My problem is this: We recently hired a new co-worker in my office, who I’ve gotten to know quite well over the last few months. He and his husband both work in the field, and their experiences bear some striking similarities to the situations I describe in the book that I wrote before I met this particular couple. I had thought that maybe I might try to get it published, but now the idea of publishing something that could be interpreted as a fictionalization of their lives is making me uncomfortable. What if they think I used them as source material? I haven’t yet sorted out all of my feelings about women writing about gay male romance in general, and to add to that the potential to deeply offend a lifelong colleague and friend and I’m having a bit of a crisis. Do I keep writing this? Change enough details that the similarities seem less stark? Just not try to publish it? For what it’s worth, many friends know I write recreationally, several know I’m working on a novel, and nobody in this friend group knows what it’s about.
—A Pen Name Might Not Be Enough