I almost skipped my annual Thanksgiving-related blog post this year, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’m exhausted—still recovering from/adjusting to my gargantuan move to Australia six months ago, as well as the temporary (hopefully) loss of my creative spirit, which apparently got held up in Customs upon my May arrival in Sydney. Secondly, Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated in Australia, so I figured I could get off on a technicality.
But then it hit me: Thanksgiving isn’t about geography, and it certainly isn’t about loopholes or doing the bare minimum or self-pity. It’s about gratitude. It’s about appreciating just how fortunate you are to be walking around and breathing above ground even if there are days when you feel you’re drowning.
And here’s the beautiful thing about gratitude—it floats in anything. All you need to do is grab onto it to keep your head above water.
So, sure, there may be some waves knocking me around, some baby sharks circling, but they don’t distract from the fact I have a helluva lot to be grateful for.
Below are the five things topping that list:
My Family.I don’t know where I’d be or what I’d do without the love and support of my wife, Miranda. And my daughter, Leah. And my parents, Lynne and Stu. And my older brother, Todd. (Not to mention my wonderful in-laws!) Living in the same household or even just having regular phones calls with a moody, anxious, somewhat delusional writer like me is challenging, to say the least. “Would you people three rooms over please stop breathing so much—I’m trying to write a novel in here!” Or “I know we haven’t spoken in weeks, but can you call back later—I’m very busy disposing of an imaginary body.”
The hell that I put my characters through is a picnic compared to the hell I put my loved ones through. Because the hell I put my loved ones through is real, despite the fact that I do it in the name of fiction—fiction that in most cases relatively few people will ever read. Fiction that rarely pays the bills—or even a bill. Fiction that … is fiction. So the fact that my family still loves me and accepts me for the freak I am is a highly thankable offense.
My Dog. I was going to include my dog, Wallaby, in the “Family” section above, but he’s so damn beautiful and such a daily source of joy and unconditional love, I just had to give him his own subhead—even though doing so puts me at real risk of having my face eaten by my cat, Dingo.
My tremendous gratitude for Wallaby was made all the stronger very recently, when he had a frightening brush with death—courtesy of the Australian paralysis tick Miranda found embedded in his neck. (I’ll spare you the details; however, if you’re curious, you can google the name of the venomous parasite in question, you sick bastard.) Thanks to Miranda’s discovery and our vet’s skillful administration of the antiserum, Wallaby has made a full recovery and will live to see many more days of us spoiling the shit out of him.
My Friends. While most of my friends are imaginary, I do have a handful of real-life cronies I’m very close with even though they live thousands of miles away. Unlike my imaginary ones, most of the real-life ones aren’t criminals. But I don’t hold that against them. They’re still good people, and I’m lucky to have them in my life. (I’d list their names here, but I don’t want them to undergo the scrutiny of the FBI or any other law enforcement agency just for being acquainted with the likes of me. See, I’m a good friend.)
My Readers.Despite me not having put out a new novel in some time, I’m extremely fortunate to have a wonderful, loyal group of readers who can’t wait till I DO. And honestly, them buying my books isn’t even the best part of our relationship. The best part is knowing that each time I start a blog post or a newsletter intro or a short story, there’s people out there who give at least a little bit of a damn, folks who’ll “listen” to the words bleeding from my fingertips. Many writers claim, “I write for myself.” Well, they’re lying. For they, just like me, live for having others peruse their personal thoughts and ideas and creative outbursts, their shameless self-promotion, their wild rants, their cries for help.
There are so many other things people could be doing or have to do that don’t involve reading a single word I write. So whenever someone lets me in—even if it’s through the tiniest sliver and for only a few moments here and there, I don’t take it for granted. And if you’re reading this, I can only assume you’re one of those someones. So, seriously, THANK YOU.
My Scenery.Sydney and the surrounding area—and, really, Australia in general—is ridiculously, stunningly, almost obscenely beautiful. I’ve been here a full six months, and rarely does a day go by that my jaw doesn’t drop at the sight of some seaside cliff or coastal sunrise/sunset or impossibly colorful bird or flowering tree.
You have two primary choices in the treatment of anxiety and depression around these parts: 1) take medication; or 2) just step outside and open your eyes.
Whether or not you celebrate Thanksgiving, here’s hoping the things you have to be grateful for far, far outweigh whatever you may be struggling with.
Most people are familiar with “the five stages of grief” introduced by renowned Swiss-American psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her groundbreaking 1969 book, On Death and Dying. As a writer, I often think about death, dying and grief—to, you know, cheer myself up. And it recently dawned on me that the way Kübler-Ross described how humans deal with the loss of a loved one is quite similar to how writers deal with rejection. The thing is, though, loved ones die only once, where a manuscript can go on to die several dozen deaths.
So, yeah, being a writer is more tragic than being a human.
Now, I’m definitely not saying I would cry less over the death of a loved one than I would over my fiction getting rejected. And the reason I’m not saying that is some of my loved ones read this blog.
I’ve made my point. It’s time now to lighten the mood by taking a closer look at writerly death and pain. Below I apply the famed Kübler-Ross model to manuscript rejection and describe how the totally unbearable devastation a writer experiences upon being rejected eventually gets processed to become only mostly unbearable devastation.
STAGE 1: Denial. Upon learning their work has been rejected, the first thing a writer experiences is a strong sense of “there’s no way that actually happened.” This usually entails convincing themselves the agent or publisher they submitted their work to suffered a stroke in the midst of reading it, resulting in moderate to severe brain damage and rendering said agent/publisher susceptible to wildly irrational decisions. Denial may also take the form of the writer pretending they never even submitted their work to the person or entity in question, chalking up the whole rejection to the fact that the publishing world is undoubtedly conspiring against them.
STAGE 2: Anger. Once the denial starts to subside—which generally happens within a day or two of receiving the rejection but can last until the end of time—feelings of anger, resentment and even blind rage will move in and spoil the writer’s drinking binge. Most of this ire will be aimed at the person or publishing house that issued the rejection, but it’s not at all uncommon for the writer to (mis)direct a lot of anger at family, friends, neighbors, former English teachers, pets, traffic, anyone ahead of them in line at the supermarket, and, last but certainly not least, the universe.
Fortunately, such anger rarely if ever escalates into violence—unless the writer remains conscious during this stage.
STAGE 3: Bargaining. The anger following a rejection usually lasts only a day or so before the writer realizes all is not lost, so long as they remain desperate for validation and willing to blatantly lie to regain a sense of control. A typical scenario might feature a recently rejected writer promising God or the universe or their favorite stuffed animal that, if the manuscript in question is accepted soon, she or he will be a better person going forward—one who doesn’t alienate friends and family to write; one who doesn’t drink or do drugs or watch The Bachelor to escape their writing failures; one who does start to bathe regularly and occasionally wear pants. However, as with all psychological bargaining, such promises are innately impossible to keep.
STAGE 4: Depression. This stage can be difficult for friends and family of the writer to spot, as 97.3% of writers are depressed regardless of whether or not they’ve recently been rejected. Still, the depression that descends upon a writer following the bargaining stage is generally a big one—the kind that makes most writers consider giving up writing for good and taking a job at a sewage treatment facility as an unpaid intern, which, oddly enough, pays triple what fiction writing does. Additional telltale signs of rejection-based depression include:
sleeping in the same pajamas for weeks … in a public park;
folding each page of the manuscript into pill-size and using them to replace previously prescribed antidepressants;
pretending to have friends, then refusing to answer their calls.
STAGE 5: Acceptance. Rejection grief finally comes to an end during the acceptance stage—that is unless the writer gets confused and thinks the acceptance stage refers to their manuscript finally being accepted. Those writers—following several hours of intense joy and elation before learning the truth—are usually dead within a week. Fortunately though, such confusion occurs with only about 48% of writers, thus the majority of scribes survive the agony of rejection and go on to live long and unsuccessful lives.
I look forward to receiving your comments and thoughts about this piece, and to rejecting any that don’t perfectly align with my views.
The title of this post may seem a tad self-serving, a bit heavy on the ME, but hey, when you’re an author during a pandemic and you haven’t had a novel out in nearly four years, you desperately look for ways to celebrate your work.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to be tooting my horn too loudly or pressuring any of you to buy my existing books. I’m merely going to be presenting myself with numerous arbitrary, self-created awards to show you what you’re missing out on if you’ve never read any of my novels. This is totally normal behavior for an author … named Greg Levin.
My goal is really just to have a little fun and elicit a little laughter during these turbulent times. In other words, please buy my books.
So, without further ado or any more poorly veiled attempts at marketing, let’s get started with the First Annual Greg Levin Writing Awards (Recognizing Outstanding Achievements in Fiction by an Author Named Greg Levin).
Best Line in a Scene Featuring Voluntary Euthanasia:
“The trick to looking excited when children are presented to you for sex is to remember you are saving their lives. If you don’t look excited, the pimps will get suspicious. Show your anger and disgust, and you ruin everything. For help getting into character, think about the biggest douchebag frat guy you’ve ever met, imagine him with several million dollars, multiply his money and demeanor by ten, and then act like that guy. Right up until the cops remove your handcuffs and thank you for your service.”
Best Conversation Among a Group of Terminally Ill Vigilante Serial Killers:
Ellison’s eyes opened almost as wide as his mouth. “Wait, you mean you guys are behind the two cyanide incidents that were just in the news?”
“Yes, that would be us,” Jenna replied.
“Jesus Christ. I thought maybe you had gotten the idea from the news, I didn’t realize you were the news.”
“Neither does anyone else,” said Jenna.
“How long do you think THAT will last?” Ellison asked.
“We don’t know, but considering our health, it doesn’t have to last too long.”
“Yeah, fear of getting caught isn’t much of an inhibitor with us,” said Gage, who’d been sitting at the table waiting for an opening. “We aim to keep this up as long as we’re still standing.”
Ellison glared at Gage. “Jenna mentioned you ‘succeeded’ in your lone attempt, so I suppose that means I’m talking to a murderer right now?”
"Can you please stop behaving like we're going to be alive in two years, Ellison?” Jenna asked, rolling her eyes. “You have to put these poisonings into context. You're not seeing the big picture."
“Yeah, you're making it sound like we're the bad guys,” said Gage. "We're in a unique position. I mean, think about it, we have an extraordinary opportunity here. Becoming killers could have a real positive impact in the community.”
Best Scene Featuring a Buddhist Getting Trained for an Undercover Sex Trafficking Sting Operation:
And the winner is…
In Wolves’ Clothing—for the following scene:
Three minutes into the video, I glance at Caleb. He’s fully engrossed in what he’s watching. And what he’s watching is a nine-year-old from Myanmar lying in a hospital cot a day after having her dislocated jaw wired shut.
Five minutes in, Caleb is quietly jotting down notes as a pimp caught on a hidden phone camera is bragging about how many virgins he’s able to bring to the next night’s party.
At the ten-minute mark, as the video is ending, Caleb closes his eyes and takes several deep breaths.
I’ve seen this before with trainees.
“It’s okay, man,” I say as I pat him on the back. “Should I grab the trash bin?”
With his eyes still shut, Caleb says, “I’m good” and continues breathing deeply.
“It’s okay, man. No shame. What you just watched is too much for most people.”
Caleb says nothing. Just long inhales followed by longer exhales. Hands in his lap. He looks too serene to vomit, but I get up and grab the bin from the corner anyway and place it by his chair.
“Do you need anything else?” I ask, wondering how I’m going to break it to Fynn that her golden boy isn’t cut out for the job.
Caleb takes a couple more deep breaths, and opens his eyes. He says, “My apologies, I was just—”
“No need to apologize,” I say. “We can take a break if you want.”
He shakes his head and goes, “That won’t be necessary. I just needed to get that little meditation out of the way. You know, send my intention out into the universe.”
Now it’s me who might need the trash bin.
Caleb points at my laptop screen and says, “Those traffickers are in pain, and they haven’t learned how to respond to that pain with mercy and empathy.”
He says, “The intention I sent out was for them to recognize this. To help them ease their suffering, and that of the girls.”
Oh shit.
It’s more serious than I suspected.
Caleb isn’t an alcoholic or a drug addict or suffering from PTSD. He isn’t depressed or bipolar or a masochist.
He’s a Buddhist.
I can overlook a lot of shit in a Jump Team member, but total enlightenment may be where I have to draw the line.
Best Author of a Novel by Greg Levin:
And the winner is…
No way—ME?! I’m shocked and honored. I’m humbled and grateful. Most importantly, I’m calling to make an appointment with a psychiatrist.
Best Protagonist of a Novel by Greg Levin:
And the winner is…
It’s a three-way tie! Eli Edelmann from The Exit Man; Gage Adder from Sick to Death; Zero Slade from In Wolves’ Clothing.
Best Novel by Greg Levin:
And the winner is…
Get outa town—another three-way tie! The Exit Man, Sick to Death, and In Wolves’ Clothing.
Wow! I’ve never been so honored or so proud or so concerned about my mental health. These awards truly are an embarrassment of riches—or as my father is probably thinking, just an embarrassment.
Writing is a lonely endeavor, but being a writer needn’t be. And shouldn’t be.
It took me a while to learn that, and thank goodness I finally did. Otherwise I’d now likely be living in an inpatient mental health facility or roaming the streets and shouting at invisible enemies while wearing a tinfoil hat.
Once it hit me that other writers were not my competition but rather my colleagues, my confidants, my Klonopin, it felt as if a weight as heavy as a bunch of rejected manuscripts had been lifted off my shoulders.
At first, the most valuable thing about befriending fellow scribes seemed to be the source of commiseration it provided. (I’d always gotten plenty of pity and emotional support from family; however, I soon found nothing could compare to the joy of co-bitching and co-moaning with a bunch of like-minded, like-whining authors.) Then, a few years ago, I had an even bigger revelation: Happiness comes not only from being miserable together, but also from wishing success upon one another. Cheering each other on. Genuinely hoping things stop sucking for everyone involved.
Who knew?
In addition to giving you the positive jolt of endorphins that comes with exhibiting generosity, sending out vibes of hope and success to author friends also opens up the possibility of living vicariously through people you like and respect, as well as helps to take your mind off of everything that isn’t going right for you and your writing career. Sure, a little envy may creep in here and there when one of your peers breaks out, but nothing a couple of shots of liquor every night can’t tamp down.
Now, all of the above rambling is really just a preamble. It’s me setting the stage for what I really want to do today, and what I really want to do today is highlight a host of awesome, talented crime fiction authors I’m honored to call friends (even if just on Twitter), and whom I sincerely feel are deserving of a wider reading audience.
So without further ado, below (listed alphabetically) are just some of the great writers—who also happen to be great humans—I won’t stop rooting for until they make it big and start ghosting me:
(*I hesitated to include Craig, as he already kinda broke out with two amazing books—The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria—in the early-mid 2000s; however, the publishing gods haven’t smiled on this BRILLIANT writer enough since, and he deserves for that to change ASAP.)
For this last author, I’m going out of alphabetical order, and with good reason. Scott Kelly passed away suddenly last October, and I want to be sure he and his work stand out in this post. Scott—my friend, fellow Vonnegut and Palahniuk fanatic, and partner in both crime (fiction) and drinking—was perhaps the best writer most people have never heard of. I could write an entire post about Scott’s inventive brand of existential transgressive fiction (and probably will in the near future), but for now I’ll just ask that you take a moment to check out his work. There’s nothing I’d love more than for Scott to posthumously achieve the wide readership and acclaim his talent so blatantly warrants—and which Scott never complained about not receiving.
Scott, I miss you, brother. I think about and read you often, and will continue spreading the word about your words until I join you, wherever you are.
NOTE: If you consider yourself one of my writer friends (or even just Twitter friends who writes) and you don’t see your name above, it’s likely because: a) I haven’t yet gotten around to reading your work; or b) you’ve already “made it” in my eyes. Yes, I’m talking to you S.A. Cosby, Jennifer Hillier, Rachel Howzell Hall, and Stephen Mack Jones. And guess what? … I couldn’t be happier for you!
It’s 2:48 a.m. and I’m awake because an under-developed fictional person who lives inside my head insisted on ripping me from my slumber to discuss some plot points for the story he’s set to star in.
Just an average Monday night/Tuesday morning for me.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining. I actually welcome these sorts of disruptions to my sleep, my silence, my sanity.
That’s the problem.
You see, fiction writing is a sickness. An addiction as glorious as it is gut-wrenching, as sublime as it is shameful. I couldn’t live without writing novels and short stories—and they’ll surely be the death of me.
And apparently I’m okay with that.
I’ve never considered myself a masochist before, but the more I examine the evidence, masochism’s really the only explanation. Why else would I continue to go all in on my fiction, even after getting my heart broken and my soul crushed by so many near misses over the years, including—but certainly not limited to—the following:
Two TV options—one with HBO, one with Showtime—that didn’t get renewed at the wire.
A third TV option (with another major network) that died just prior to the contract being signed;
A late-stage rejection by a big literary agent. NOTE: I did finally land a different and even more amazing agent last year, so I no longer even think about the previously mentioned rejection as a “near miss.” Still, guess what happened right after signing with my amazing agent mere days before she was planning on submitting my manuscript to several big crime fiction publishers? Just a little thing called Covid-19. (Not that the pandemic has brought publishing to its knees, but it might make some major houses a little less likely to take a chance on a relatively unknown author like me.)
Sound like a whole lot of whining and whingeing on my part? On the surface, maybe, but don’t be fooled. Deep down, and not even that deep, I love my failures, my misfortune, my poor timing. Of course I do—I’m a writer. We’re not truly happy unless we’re miserable.
The truth is, near misses only make me stronger. Well, my addiction stronger, anyway. Every incident of almost-but-not-quite feeds my disease, fuels it, compels me to continue forsaking most of my responsibilities and alienating my friends and family in pursuit of my lifelong dream of landing a solid traditional book deal—a book deal that seems to creep closer and closer but never quite materializes. A book deal that, if I’m lucky, would provide me with a fraction of what I would make if I spent a little less time writing and a little more time working even just a steady entry-level job.
That’s right, I’ve got full-on, stop-for-nothing tunnel vision that, best case scenario, might eventually lead to me earning enough to cover a year’s worth of nights at an extended stay motel after my wife throws my ass out for my fiction problem.
Making matters worse, or better—I’ve forgotten which—are the little victories I’ve managed to achieve via my writing over the years: the handful of indie author awards; the starred review from Publishers Weekly; the solid number of favorable reader reviews on Amazon; my favorite author telling me I have “it” (whatever “it” is). Each of these positive but by no means monumental achievements is the equivalent of a neighborhood drug dealer handing me a sample of the good stuff, knowing I’ll get hooked and stay hooked and keep coming back for more—even beg for some when I don’t have the funds to cover it.
Now you may be thinking, Isn’t the title of this post The Shame and the GLORY of Fiction Addiction? Where’s the glory part, Greg?
Well, the odd thing is, my answer to the “glory” question is perhaps the most shameful thing about all of this. For, you see, all or most of the glory that comes with fiction addiction occurs inside the head of the afflicted, inside the mind of the writer.
It’s the internal mania that floods a writer’s amygdala every time they fire off a killer sentence or paragraph or scene—hell, sometimes even just a strong verb.
It’s the delusions of grandeur that take over whenever a writer hears a compliment or sees four or five stars tethered to a review of their book.
It’s the nearly lethal levels of euphoria that send a writer skyward whenever they type the magic words “THE END” after months or years of pulling characters’ teeth and rolling a heavy plot up a jagged mountain.
And, of course, it’s all the near misses before they become near misses. All the little victories before hard evidence reveals those victories aren’t going to evolve into much larger ones.
But perhaps the greatest glory of fiction addiction is this: there is no cure. As shameful as it may be for a writer to keep plugging away and grinding and hustling and hoping and dreaming against all odds, there’s something supremely glorious about the fact that such agonizing persistence will never stop.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s 4:07 a.m., and that unstable, underdeveloped character I mentioned at the outset—the one who woke me up to talk about his tale—he’s got a box-cutter to my throat and won’t set me free me until he’s said his piece and gets his way.
Like I said, shameful.
And glorious.
Any of you out there have a creative pursuit that often feels more like an addiction? I'd love to hear about it—that way I'll feel less like a freak.
