K. Marvin Bruce

Writing keeps me sane.  Writing drives me insane.  Often the only stability that I have in a tortured world is my writing.  Of course, writing doesn’t pay.  Long ago I made myself a note inside the cover of my commonplace book: “whether published or not, I am a writer.” A factor that is difficult to include in this equation is depression.  Like many writers I live in a miasma of low-grade depression much of the time.  It even fuels my art.  I write my most humorous material when I am despondent.  There is a depression that is debilitating, however, and even causes writing to become a strain. “There is a wisdom that is woe,” Herman Melville wrote, “but there is a woe that is madness.”  Yes, Herman, I have been there with you.  At times it is so dark that I can only glimpse Poe or Lovecraft as my guides, distantly ahead.  In the twilight we find each other. Since being released from my contract with Vagabondage Pre...

The internet has filled the world with noise.  Communications specialists tell us that it is important to distinguish signal from noise since signal is potentially useful information.  Ah, but the internet is so vast!  SETI would have more chance of finding signal in an infinite universe. So when I heard from my contracted publisher that Passion of the Titans , my first novel accepted for publication, is being released back to me, my breath caught in my throat.  Perhaps I should’ve heard the signal earlier.  Accepted last summer, it was downgraded to an ebook release this spring, and then finally cancelled. Wheat and chaff are very different from one another.  As are sheep and goats.  Signal and noise are far more ambiguous. Like Edgar Allan Poe, and probably here the likeness ends, I have read many inferior bits of literature that have engulfed public demand.  Has anybody ever tried to praise the literary merits of Fifty Shade...