It was time to take Riley for his morning walk. I knew it and Riley knew it, which was why he was staring at me through the office doorway with those big dog eyes.
“Okay,” I told him. “Let’s go.” And that’s when the text came in.
“Be careful” was printed on the screen.
I texted back, “I will.”
I started to get up, heard a buzz, and read: “And be alert to your surroundings, and if anything happens, call me right away.”
I texted the thumbs-up sign, stuck the phone in my pocket, and we headed out.
Now, when a former crime boss tells you to be alert to your surroundings, you listen. After all, this particular crime boss has survived multiple assassination attempts and knows how to react and how to survive when someone means you harm. And today, yeah, someone meant me harm.
Was Peter, the former crime boss, overreacting? Sure. I mean, I knew that Esekiel —not his real name, but the one I’ll use—wasn’t hiding in my neighborhood with a sniper rifle. No way. After all, Ezekiel lived several states away, and his threats were more . . . What? Personal? Vindictive? Vengeful? Chicken shit? Sure. But I did stay alert to my surroundings as Peter told me to. And so did Riley.
It’s funny that in my business life—my sales funnel, working lunch, PO-gathering, proposal-delivering life—I’ve never, ever had a single issue where any specific person wanted to do me harm. Not one. Sure, I’ve had people upset with me; I’ve blown deals, burned bridges, all that normal stuff. Bad things happened and we moved on because that’s how most of the world works.
But in my writing world, in my creative life, over 30 years, I have had 4 people who have wanted me . . . well, maybe not dead, but hurt. Wounded. Broken. Damaged. And these people went to extreme means to pursue that goal.
That means that 4 times my average—yes, in my world, 0 x 4 = 4—from normal world to writing world, there have been issues where former clients wanted bad, sometimes very bad, things to happen to me.
Ezekiel is the most recent. And the most bizarre.
I met Ezekiel a year and a half ago. He was working for a wealthy businessman in a different country who had a book that was successful there. Ezekiel’s client wanted to bring this book to the United States, so Ezekiel was hired as the translator for a Zoom call between this gentleman and myself.
The meeting went well, I agreed to help, and Ezekiel set up another call for a different project. That one looked promising as well, and so did the next one. Then Ezekiel told me about his own project. His book. I listened.
“Since I bring you so much business,” he said, “you market my book for free, yes?”
It was phrased as a question, but it really wasn’t.
“I guess,” I said. “Sure. If all these other projects come in.”
Some did. Some didn’t. And the few that did were smaller in fees than the client promised . And it was also at this time that I realized that Ezekiel was not only extremely high maintenance—he was calling, emailing, and texting multiple times a day—but there was also something . . . else. Ezekiel was—what’s the right word? Oh yeah. Nuts.
Ezekiel is way, way out there. Besides the serious personality defects of being arrogant, hostile, manipulative, controlling, and rigid, Ezekiel is also never, ever wrong. Even though I could see there were times that he knew he was wrong, it was obvious even he knew he was, but he could never admit it. I’ve never seen anything like it. If he messed up and said that the sky was pink, from that point on, even after he realized the truth, the sky would be pink.
I knew pretty quickly that I couldn’t work with Ezekiel on his project. No way. So, before it officially began, I reached out and nicely told him that my workload had increased and I couldn’t take him on. Then I offered to pay him a commission on the writing jobs that he recommended me for instead of taking on his job for free.
This was the first snap.
Ezekiel demanded—and that’s the perfect word here: demanded—that I take on his book project. I declined.
Before I go any further, let me give an analogy here to prepare you for what’s coming next.
Let’s say that I have a car I want to you to buy. And I really, really want you to buy this car, but you don’t want to. So I call you every day. I start following you to work to talk about the car. I’m at your favorite lunch place to ask if you want to buy the car. I’m outside your house. I text you continuously, asking you to buy the car.
Sure, okay, I can do all of those things. It’s obnoxious, but not crazy.
What I probably wouldn’t do—and what most other humans beings would probably never do—is contact your boss and tell them that you are untrustworthy because of this car transaction you backed out on, and that you should be fired. I most likely would not reach out to the principal of your kids’ school and tell them that you have some legal issues involving a car that they should know about. And I definitely wouldn’t meet with the pastor of your church talking about your car fraud, all the while telling you that this can all stop, all of this will go away, if you just—just—buy this car.
No. I wouldn’t do that. Few people would. . . .
Now let’s go back to Ezekiel a year and a half ago, when first I told him I couldn’t work with him. Ezekiel knew enough about me to launch a bizarre attack. He contacted my literary agent—a person he had no connection to or dealings with in any way—to complain about my ethics and to suggest that I be dropped as a client. He reached out to several of the parties involved in a big book announcement that had just been made, letting them know about my flawed character. He sent emails, made calls, and contacted anyone he could to bring pressure on me. All the while, he kept telling me that all of this would stop if I just worked on his book.
Strangely, if there was one emotion that rose up for me during that time, it was shame. Isn’t that weird? You’d think it would be anger or fear, but nope. It was just truckloads of shame that were delivered, to mix with the piles of embarrassment and imposter syndrome that were already inside me. I felt terrible that these key people in my creative life were being made to suffer because of me. I was ashamed.
But I had no time to wallow in this shame; I had to fix it. I reached out to get help from an incredible gentleman who does conflict resolution. He met with Ezekiel. He met with me. He prepared me for what I needed to do and we all got on a Zoom call together.
It was done. I would walk away. Ezekiel would find someone else. The harassment would stop, and life would go back to normal.
And it did.
For one year.
Until this Saturday.
Now, knowing Ezekiel, something must have happened to him this past week that reminded him that I was still out there. Something brought back the realization that he was over there, and I was over here—me, the disobedient; me, the non-compliant. That realization must have created an itch.
Because on Saturday, completely out of the blue, after I hadn’t heard from him in a year, Ezekiel resurfaced. He emailed me a multipage manifesto of his plans to contact the Writer’s Guild with a formal complaint about my moral conduct. He told me that I had two days to agree to work with him on his book or he would write and file a damaging report that would stop my career.
Now, the one difference between this new Ezekiel battle and the first one was that Ezekiel can’t surprise me this time. I know his MO. I can’t stop him if he writes to the Writer’s Guild—an organization I have no connection to and that has no authority over me, by the way—but I knew what he was capable of outside of that. So I circled the wagons and got in front of the problem.
I quickly contacted the list of people I thought he would reach out to: I started with my literary agent. Then I contacted Peter, the former crime boss, whose book is going to be pretty high-profile in a few months when it is released—something Ezekiel could easily see on Google. I sent a cease and desist to Ezekiel and told him that I had contacted my literary agent, I also contacted people I work with so they would let me know if he reached out to them. I informed him that I had done all this as a courtesy. The next step would be to pursue legal action.
So, what’s the point of all of this? Well, I told you all of that to get to these three points:
The first is that I Peter and I had become friends. He and I have been working on his book for over two years, and we’ve become incredibly close. But I was totally unprepared at how protective and angry he became when I told him about Ezekiel. Peter called and texted me multiple times a day, checking in, making sure I was all right. He was so upset that he wanted me to come stay at his house or for him to come and stay with me. I was incredibly touched by this.
The second point is that my literary agent and I talked right after I told her about Ezekiel. “Look, kiddo,” she said. “I know who you are, and we know who you are, and no one is going to ever change that. We’ve all got this together.”
Which brings me to the third and most important point.
After writing for almost three decades, I’ve discovered that the joy, the pleasure, the impact that comes from writing doesn’t come just from the work, but from those connected to it. It’s born from the strength and love of the people who have joined you, because their success is now is tied to yours. They win if you win. They are your partners. They are your friends.
And a hundred Ezekiel’s can never take that away.
Once spring hits and then all through summer, everywhere we go we see people having picnics.
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