Nothing says “I love literature” like cheering a fight to the death.

Every reader at one point or another has found themselves enthralled by some epic melee between a favorite protagonist and that character’s sworn enemy—or some other human obstacle standing in the protagonist’s way. As much as I love such scenes of intense conflict and tension, I often find myself wishing for even more. Like, wishing I could lift different characters out of their respective books to see how they’d fare in a fight with one another.

Yes, I am seeking professional help for this condition. But in the meantime, I’ve come up with a few literary death-matches for the ages—ones any devout fan of fiction would die for. Or at least finish reading this blog post for.

Enjoy!     

Tyler Durden from Fight Club vs. Alex from A Clockwork Orange

A no-holds-barred bout between these two anarchy A-listers would be as hilariously entertaining as it would be deadly. I can already hear the cacophonous laughter from both characters as they suffer and deliver bone-shattering blows coupled with witty, derisive barbs. Their mutual love of destruction and mayhem would further inspire each to keep bringing and receiving the pain. In the end though, it’s hard to imagine Alex still standing. As hard as it is to defeat a highly disturbed fictional individual, it’s even harder to defeat a highly disturbed figment of the imagination of an a even more disturbed fictional individual. Which is why the first unspoken rule of Fight Club is you don’t get into a death-match with the founder of Fight Club.

Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo vs. Patrick Bateman from American Psycho

I’d pay good money to see one of the most badass vigilante feminists in literature square off against one of the most psychotic misogynistic serial killers in literature—and I’d place more good money on the former taking down the latter. Sure, Patrick Bateman knows how to time the dropping of an active chainsaw down a spiral stairwell so that it perfectly eviscerates a fleeing victim, but such gruesome stunts wouldn’t fly with Ms. Salander, who’s smart enough to wear her kickass black motorcycle helmet whenever she senses the slightest chance she’ll encounter trouble. That, plus Patrick’s insatiable ego and lust would put him at a distinct disadvantage. Where he’d be focused on having sex with Lisbeth and adding her to his list of amorous conquests before murdering and dismembering her, Lisbeth would be focused solely on going for the kill. She has zero interest in external validation from men, and is the last person a man like Patrick would ever want catching him with his pants down. 

“Richard Parker” the tiger from Life of Pi vs. the cat from The Cat in the Hat

Who doesn’t love a good catfight, am I right? Now, I realize a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger versus a fast-talking street cat might seem like a total mismatch on paper, but the truth is … nah, I’m not gonna lie—The Cat in the Hat would be a goner. But that’s okay; I never really liked that damn cat or his hat. True, he did teach millions of bored children how tons of fun can be had even on a dreary, rainy day; however, in the process he nearly destroyed a perfectly nice home, forced two innocent children into a high-stakes game of deception with their mother, and made his two kooky friends live inside a box. What a dick. So, him getting completely devoured by a giant ferocious feline—who by the way, showed tremendous restraint with that boy on that boat—well, that’s just karma.

Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games vs. Robin Hood from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

I’ve got nothing against either one of these characters and wish neither of them any harm; it’s just, archery is totally badass and I can’t help but wonder which of these two legends would be the truer shot when the stakes couldn't be higher. No doubt both heroes are highly skilled and very brave, but I’d have to give Katniss the slight upper hand—not only because she has more modern equipment, but also because Robin Hood’s skimpy tights would offer little in the way of protection. One shot anywhere near the femoral artery and the dude would bleed out. One shot a little bit higher and the dude would wish he'd bleed out.

Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon vs. Sweeney Todd from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

As with the Katniss/Robin Hood matchup, I think both of these characters are fine, upstanding individuals whom I’d be honored to call friends. It’s hard not to respect how they each use the whole human whenever they kill one. That’s very green of them, very ecological. Still, it would be an absolute morbid thrill to watch them battle to the death and, depending on the outcome, witness the winner either eating the loser with a nice Chianti or having their friend make sausage out of him.

What literary character death matches would YOU love to see? Or do you find the very notion of even fictional violence and murder appalling? If so, why are you reading my blog? You must be lost.

This past year was the longest decade ever. And now that it’s finally over, I’m excited to welcome in 2021. Hell, I’d be excited to welcome in 1621 or 1721 or any other year or even a chainsaw-wielding serial killer. Anything but 2020 again.

A new year is a time for resolutions and predictions. And since I have a natural lack of resolve, I’m going to focus solely on the prediction part. Of course, making predictions requires one to have a solid grasp on reality, which I lack even more than I do resolve. Thus, I’m going to focus solely on predictions about fiction.

So, without further delay or convoluted transitional statements, I bring you my Five Fiction Predictions for 2021:  

1) There will be a 325% increase in characters wearing masks. This will occur across almost all contemporary genres. The increase will be notably less in superhero graphic novels and literary erotica, the characters of which have been wearing masks for decades.

2) Fight scenes will be almost completely replaced by shootouts. Due to authors now feeling compelled to work social distancing into their stories, readers can expect to see fewer scenes featuring hand-to-hand combat and female characters kicking predatory male characters in the crotch, and more scenes of gunplay and female characters shooting predatory male characters in the crotch.

3) Horror sales will decline. I’ve always loved a good horror story and personally know and respect several authors who write in this genre, so this wasn’t an easy prediction for me. But hey, I don’t get paid to make or keep friends. In fact, I don’t get paid period and don’t have any friends—thus I’m just going with my gut here. Sales of horror novels will steadily start trending downward because, after all the chaos and terror we’ve all had to deal with in real life lately, everyone’s just bored of nightmares. Death and gore and terrifying suspense? That’s just an average Tuesday nowadays. 

4) First-person POV serial killer novels will dominate U.S. bestseller lists. With such anger and divisiveness tearing America apart, people are becoming increasingly aggressive and violent—including authors. But since most authors never learned how to throw a proper punch and tend to lack upper-body strength, many will go on fictional murder sprees to help them take out their frustration on people who don’t think exactly like them or buy their books.

5) There will be a big shift to historical fiction and sci-fi. Lots of authors of contemporary fiction are sick of trying to adapt their work to align with what’s happening in the real world. This will cause many to abandon modern-day plots and settings for ones far enough in the past or future to eliminate the need for their characters to constantly wash their hands, stand six feet apart, and horde toilet paper.

YOUR turn: Do you have any fiction predictions for 2021? More importantly, do any of them hint at a massive increase in sales of MY books? 

I had heard of them. I’d even seen some of their pre-dawn tweets upon sitting down to write at 9 a.m. like a normal human. These folks would claim such absurd things as having just added 2,000 words to their novel-in-progress—with an hour to spare before even grabbing breakfast.

I used to just scoff at these “#5amwritersclub” participants. I’d dismiss them as maniacs. Freaks. Members of a dangerous cult.

And now, suddenly, I’m one of them.

No, nobody tricked or manipulated or deceived me into becoming a member. I wasn’t strong-armed or blackmailed or drugged. I simply woke up one morning at 4:30 and started writing ... and knew I’d never be the same. (Including never being able to stay up past 9 again.)

Anyway, here we are, five paragraphs into this post, which is probably a good time to get to the main point of it. And the main point is there are many benefits of waking up to write before even God gets out of bed. Following are seven reasons why I’ll never stop setting my alarm for 4:30 a.m. to write (at least until Daylight Saving Time starts again in March).

The silence. I’ve been wearing noise-canceling headphones to write for years and thus am used to relative quiet while screaming at my characters. But nothing quite compares to the blissful silence I experience now that I wear my noise-canceling headphones even when there’s no noise to cancel. The only sounds I hear these days while putting my protagonist through hell is the dull, harmonic tapping of the keyboard keys and the occasional muted crunch of my fist going through drywall whenever my protagonist refuses to cooperate. Such overall quietude has been wonderful for my creativity and fosters a true sense of calmness in the middle of murder scenes.     

The stillness. No, stillness is not the same as silence. It could be perfectly quiet inside a writing office while squirrels have a death-match in a tree right outside your window. But at 4:30 a.m., there aren’t any squirrels—squirrels aren’t stupid enough to get up in the middle of the night to work on their novel. Thus, in addition to the glorious lack of sound while I’m writing, there’s no movement to wreak havoc on my ADHD. In fact, I’ve never been more—

SQUIRREL!

Sorry about that—I’m writing this blog post in the middle of the day.

The darkness. There being so little light outside when I sit down at my writing desk each morning not only inspires me and informs the dark themes I write about but also makes it hard to see and get distracted by any homicidal squirrels. I keep the lights off in my office to further feed off the ethereal and haunting predawn energy, as well as to keep any neighbors who may be awake from catching me act out any fights or stabbings or sex scenes I’m working on. (I once forgot to keep the lights off, and the next day the house next door had a “For Sale” sign up.)    

The propulsion. When you catch a creative wave and ride it for hours into breakfast, it propels you through the rest of the day like nothing I can think of other than amphetamines. I emerge from my writing office at 7 a.m. with the energy and force of a tsunami, gleefully knocking over anything in my path. My puppy loves it; my wife dives for cover and threatens divorce.   

The “hustle factor.” There’s a lot to be said about hustling and grinding and showing grit and moxy as a writer. Most of it is said by the writers themselves. Still, it does feel damn good to soldier up and overcome the challenge of not having time to write by waking up every morning hours before any sane person would just so you can work on a book nobody’s ever going to read.

The excuses. When you wake up at 4:30 a.m. and make sure everyone you know knows it, it gives you a lot of leverage for getting out of doings things you don’t want to do and seeing people you don’t want to see. For example:

“Darn it, buddy—I’d really love to come over for a dinner party with proper social distancing that we both know won’t actually be adhered to after all the guests finish their second drink, but I’ve got my pesky manuscript to work on right around the time you’ll be getting out of bed to throw up.” 

Or:

“Shoot, honey—streaming Sex and the City reruns with you does sound like fun, but whoa, look at the time. I need to be awake, like, an hour ago. That next novel of mine isn’t going to write itself.”

Or:

"So sorry, neighbor, a puppy play-date this afternoon at 5:00 would be great—if only it didn’t encroach on my bedtime."  

The hashtag. There’s an indescribably powerful sense of pride and honor that comes with being able to legitimately add “#5amwritersclub” to a tweet—knowing that all the other authors who are awake and tweeting on Twitter instead of actually working on their book will see it.

How about YOU? How badly do you want to punch me in the face for even THINKING of encouraging you to wake up at such a ridiculously early hour to do ANYTHING, let alone WRITE? Share in the comments section below.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of being a writer—apart from the laughably low pay and the staggering loneliness and the pressure to choose all the right words to fill all the blank pages—is dealing with rejection.

Every writer, whether it’s a hugely popular author or an author more like me, has to cope with some form of rejection in their career. It may be a literary agent rejecting their query, a publisher rejecting their manuscript, or a pawnbroker rejecting their typewriter. Point is, rejection in the writing and publishing world is universal. I have a couple of fully stuffed filing cabinets to prove it, though I can’t open either of them due to all the damage they’ve sustained from being punched and kicked.

That all said, rejection needn’t be so painful. While I acknowledge it’s hard not letting a “NO” stop your flow, I assure you there are ways to lessen the sting of literary rejection—some that don’t even require prescription pharmaceuticals or more illicit drugs or voluntary euthanasia.

Below are just a few.

(Note: While this piece is intended for writers, nearly all of the tactics can be applied to non-writers and OTHER types of sane people looking to cope with rejection.)  

5) Befriend only bad writers. Whoever wrote “misery loves company” was a genius and thus not the kind of writer you should be friends with. No, you want to surround yourself with hacks—writers who are kind and generous but who lack any real talent. That way you’ll be too busy hearing about all their rejections to have time to dwell on and mope too much about your own. And isn’t feeling slightly superior to others really what friendship’s all about?

4) Marry an optimist. If you’re a writer who’s been at it a while but has yet to make a living from writing (in other words, 99.974% of all writers), chances are high you’re not an optimist. Years of rejection have a way of breeding new strains of pessimism. Therefore it’s wise to choose as your life partner someone who’ll drown you in smiles and encouragement and cheerleading chants so you don’t drown yourself in a lake after receiving your next “NO” from an agent or publisher or pawnbroker.  

3) Develop and cultivate delusions of grandeur. Just because you aren’t an optimist doesn’t mean you can’t be delusional. Where optimism is a positive state of mind that requires a lot of effort, delusions of grandeur are positive signs of mental illness and thus very achievable for most writers. If you’re lucky, your delusions will enable you to convince yourself that you’ve been getting rejected because you’re actually too talented. I have a friend who’s fortunate enough to be crazy enough to believe agents and publishers reject him out of their fear he’s going to be too huge an author for them to handle. He’s certain they’d rather pass on his books than go through the inevitable grief and heartbreak of losing him to a more prestigious entity. You’ve never seen such a confident unpublished author! It’s beautiful.

2) Be placed into a medically induced coma. Admittedly this is sort of an outlandish approach, but then so is writing novels for money or enjoyment. The good news is being placed into a medically induced coma is a surefire way to not only lessen the sting of rejection but also lose weight while getting time off from your loathsome day job. Think of it as going on a peaceful yoga retreat without the worst part—the yoga.

1) Reject rejection. This is perhaps the most powerful way to deal with rejection, and thus the most dangerous, and thus the most fun. It’s like delusions of grandeur’s much tougher cousin, as it’s a lot more active and daring than merely losing your mind. Rejecting rejection requires a writer to stare straight into the eye of each “Thank you but no” email they receive and, without flinching or punching a filing cabinet, say, “Uh uh—thank YOU but no” or “Sorry but I cannot accept your lack of acceptance.” Or something even more badass, if that’s even possible.  

What are some of YOUR tips for lessening the sting of rejection? (Don’t feel bad if I don’t accept them.) 

If I had a dime for every time my wife, Miranda, asked me to be more present or to pay closer attention or to get out of my own head, I’d be able to afford the divorce attorney I’m going to need if I don’t start heeding her requests.

In Miranda’s defense, she’s right.

In my defense, she married a novelist.

Now, before you decide to join Team Miranda and start yelling at me for not being present in my marriage, or you decide to join Team Greg and start insisting Miranda be less bossy and demanding, I need to clarify something: Miranda is bossy and demanding.

But with good reason.

You’d be bossy and demanding too if your spouse/significant other often didn’t respond to your questions or actively listen to your opinions/ideas/concerns or stepped in deer shit every single time you took a hike together.

It’s not that I don’t want to respond or to listen or to avoid animal excrement; it’s that I’m usually very busy discussing plot points with invisible people whenever my wife and I are alone. And these invisible people are even bossier and more demanding than she is. Fictional characters and muses always are.

Folks often joke about how novelists are “not all there”—implying we’re crazy, wacko, have a few screws loose. But the whole “insane author” thing is a just stereotype, one propagated by fictional writers like the one played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining, or by real writers like the one played by Virginia Woolf in, well, her tragically shortened life.

That said, it is true that most novelists are “not all there.” But I’m not talking about the chase-your-son-through-a hedge-maze-with-an-ax kind of “not all there”; I’m talking about the have-important-conversations-with-imaginary-people-in-the-presence- of-real-people kind of “not all there.” Big difference.

If I’ve just completed a three-hour writing session and I come out to the kitchen to make Miranda and I some lunch and she starts telling me about her morning or asking me about our upcoming weekend plans or why there’s a half-empty vodka bottle in my underwear drawer, it’s not likely I’ll catch everything she says or everything she picks up and throws at my head. My physical body may be standing right in front of her—nowhere near the manuscript on my laptop in my writing office—but most of my brain is still pondering the murder I just committed in Chapter 9. Miranda can’t expect my full attention in that moment or even hours or days after. Same way I can’t expect to have her full attention right after she finishes a nature hike or a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle or something else she loves more than me. (I’m not saying I love writing more than I love my wife. Why would I admit that? She occasionally reads this blog.)

Many people may read this and think I’m suggesting writers should get special treatment, be given a pass on active listening and politeness and common decency, be allowed to be distracted all the time. Well, if that’s what you’re thinking after having read this, well, then I’ve succeeded in getting my message across.

Listen, I adore my wife, couldn't live without her. And I care about all of you. But c’mon—you can’t expect me to openly demonstrate it while I’m working on a novel or during the hours or days or months in between. That’s asking too much. That’s not respecting my condition, my affliction, my plight. That’s not taking into a count that, no matter how hard I try to take in everything you’re saying and doing and asking, I’m simply not all there.

Thanks for putting up with my (mostly) satirical rant. If anyone needs me, I’ll either be writing or half-listening to my wife while getting yelled at while thinking about writing.