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Pay Per Back Writer

Confession, they say, is good for the soul.  So I’m over fifty and haven’t broken through to the paid writers’ club.  I write under a pseudonym.  I love taboo topics.

To be a writer, I’m told, you have to get out and promote your stuff.  I wonder how you do that with a false identity.  Mine is a matter of necessity.  Although I’m half-a-century on, I have family members way ahead of me.  They don’t know what I do with my free time.

My family tend to be conservative Christians.  There are some words I’ve never heard uttered in my humble homestead.  Words that, if you want to be a realistic writer, you’ve got to use.  Not to mention the ideas that the Bible strictly forbids.

I live in my head.  My daily existence is unremarkable.  That’s one reason that I write.  The other day I was reading about some people, in real life, stranded in an isolated location.  They had to do what they could to survive.  All I could think was—if I were one of them, I’d want to write it down so people could know what happened.

Literature, although fiction, is very true.  In my case anyway, the things I write about have happened, in some form, to someone.  That someone often finds his fingers on the keyboard.  Without fantasy, I’m nothing.

Writing is a place for me to do the things I’ve never done.  Nor will be able to do.  I’m married, steadily so, and yet, dare I confess, my mind wonders what it would be like to start it all over again.  What if I had been raised without the fear of Hell?


Would I have done anything differently?  Would I still have been a writer?  Would I have ever been paid for the job that takes just as much time as the one that my business card declares is who I am?  Would K. Marvin Bruce every have had a single hit?


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