I have five sons. The youngest is autistic. I’m not a software engineer — I’ve spent my career on the business side of companies, a numbers man. What I did was spend twelve years learning to read a child who couldn’t always put what was happening to him into words.
I’m not a doctor, a therapist or a researcher, and Before the Storm says so on its first page. I’m a father who paid attention, got it wrong for a long time, and slowly got it less wrong. The book is what I learned in the process — the hour-long storms, the broken windows, the apology he offers in the middle of a meltdown, and the afternoon I understood that the meltdown was never the failure.
Why a pen name
Simon Hale isn’t my name, and the boy in the book is called Eli rather than his. That decision is in the opening pages, and it wasn’t a marketing one:
His story deserves telling and his privacy deserves keeping, and I have tried to honor both. Where those two things came into conflict, privacy won.
He is a child. He didn’t choose to have his hardest hours written down, and one day he’ll be an adult who gets to decide what the internet knows about him. In a genre where children’s worst moments are routinely posted for engagement, keeping his name out of it seemed like the least I could do.
It has practical consequences and I’ve made my peace with them. I do interviews by audio and written Q&A. I decline photographs and video. There’s no author headshot on this site, and there won’t be one. If that costs the book some coverage, it costs the book some coverage.
What else is here
Alongside the book I write about the things families ask about most — why a child who holds it together all day falls apart at home, why the same question gets asked a thousand times, what the divorce statistic everyone repeats actually says. Those are on the articles page, and there’s a printable guide for teachers that you’re welcome to run off as many copies of as you like.
I’m also building something. One night at a kitchen table it occurred to me that my son’s body had been broadcasting the whole time and none of us could hear it — that there might be a way to listen to a rising day before it breaks. I was never close enough to the builders to be one of them, but we live in the first moment when the tools will meet a stubborn father halfway.
The most important user I will ever build for weighs about ninety pounds and was asleep upstairs.
That work is early and private, with a handful of families, and I’ll write about it honestly when there’s something honest to say.
Getting in touch
Email author@lovingautism.com. I read everything, and I answer almost all of it. Review copies, interviews and permissions all go to the same address, and there’s a press kit with the details.
Before the Storm is published by Staten House on October 20, 2026, in paperback and Kindle.