Daniel Aleman and the protagonist of his new novel share the same profession, the same initials, and the same plot points in their third novel. But there’s one key difference, Aleman insists.

“I promise you, I have not woken up next to a dead body.”

The protagonist in “I Might Be In Trouble,” David, wrote a debut book that was a smash success, his second was a flop and his savings account is dwindling as he struggles to find inspiration for a big comeback with his third. His literary agent, a Catherine O’Hara type, Stacey, suggests he “live a little” and the story will come. After a champagne-fueled evening of romance with a handsome stranger named Robert at the Plaza Hotel, David awakens to find the man of his dreams dead in his bed.

Naturally, rather than dial 911, he calls his literary agent.

With David unable to recall much of the night before and afraid he’ll be charged with a crime, they do the only logical thing: Go full Weekend at Bernie’s with the dead body. David and Stacey cart the corpse around New York City in Ubers, passing him off as hungover instead of, you know, over.

During a recent Zoom call, Aleman said that he drew on his personal experience with a whirlwind romance that went sour while penning “I Might Be in Trouble.”

“I connected with a handsome stranger on a dating app, someone who lived abroad, so he traveled a lot for work, which was how he found himself in my city,” Aleman says. “After he went home, I thought we might never talk again, but he made a point of staying in touch – this was someone who, similar to how Robert does in the book, makes it seem like he’s looking for a partner, like he wants a future with someone, and you are the one.”

In the book, David discovers that Robert was married. The real-life novelist Aleman learned that his own real-life handsome stranger had an active wedding registry at Pottery Barn. Aleman says he processes everything that happens in his life through writing. He wondered if it should be a drama, romance or thriller but decided he just needed to laugh about it. Really, the book became an amalgamation of all the aforementioned genres.

In “I Might Be in Trouble,” Robert’s corpse is finally stashed and David and Stacey make their escape. “Now, all there’s left to do is write the book, darling,” Stacey says to a horrified David. But ultimately, he acquiesces to her request and what does he name his main character? Daniel.

“It’s a book within a book,” Aleman says. “It’s almost like a Russian nesting doll. You open it, and there’s another doll, and then there’s another doll. I’m Daniel, writing about David, who’s writing about Daniel, who, for all we know, is writing about David. And I had so much fun playing with those lines between fiction and reality.”

Aleman says blurring these lines was a very conscious choice. Making him a writer was just the beginning, he wanted the character to have experienced similar challenges. “Publishing is a challenging industry. David mentions in the book that one moment, you can be on top of the world, and the next, you feel like the whole world is crushing you. I put so much of my personal experience with publishing in, and at the same time, I wanted to laugh at myself. I wanted to laugh at the industry and how it sometimes can make us jump through hoops.”

This is when I ask if his real-life literary agent resembles Stacey. “No, and that’s one important line that I drew because when I’m writing about myself, I have no problem having people make assumptions about me,” Aleman says. “But then, when I have a literary agent in real life, and I’m writing about an author / literary agent relationship, I do worry a little bit about people asking him the same question: Have you helped your author move a dead body?”

In the book, David is invited to promote his book on “The Breakfast Show.” He’s a nervous wreck because what if someone finds out that the book wasn’t purely a work of fiction? When the news interviewer asks what his inspiration for the novel is, he stumbles over the answer.

And in a true instance of life imitating art, last month, Aleman was invited to promote his book on the Canadian morning television news program CP24 Breakfast. He says he feels like he manifested the experience by writing it into the book. When the anchor asked what his inspiration for the book was, his answer was polished, “Pure fiction, pure imagination.”

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