K. Marvin Bruce

it, and part of me feels utterly like an ass.  Like a poser.  A wannabe.  Only professionals have agents, right? I’ve been writing since I was a tween.  Living in a small town with parents who’d never gone to college, and a mother who never finished high school, I had no idea how to get published.  I discovered that by editing my high school paper I could publish my own stories, but that felt like cheating. In my days of formal schooling, publication became purely academic.  Serious scholars published serious papers.  I tried to have some of my poetry published in my college literary magazine, but the editors said it was too depressing. Although I’ve been writing fiction since the 1970’s, I didn’t start trying to publish it until 2009.  I was scared and unsure of myself.  My first publication won a small prize, and a subsequent story won a more competitive recognition.  Those who publish books, however, were less kind. I...

If you’re like most working writers, finding time to practice the craft is a major issue.  Between working and commuting and eating breakfast before and supper after work, about 19 hours of the day are taken up.  Not much time left for writing (or sleeping). Many years ago I realized that if I was going to get any writing done I’d have to get up pretty damned early.  Most days that’s just before 3:30 a.m.  I try to write while eating breakfast.  Ideas come like a furious January snowstorm, but most remain scribbles in my notebook.  When does a writer have time to write? When I was young I had plenty of ideas for stories.  I read constantly, and when I wasn’t reading or watching television, I was writing.  It wasn’t until college, though, that it became an obsession.  After my master’s degree, working in a retail chain, I spent my time off work writing a novel. After I got married and time after work was occupied with other things...

Transformation.  It’s an idea older than the mythological Greeks.  It seems that people everywhere have wondered what it would be like to be something else.  It’s also a staple of fantasy literature. I recently read The Lizard Princess by Tod Davies.  It is a heavily symbolic work, and one that makes the reader think.  Nothing can be assumed in this world.  Even death is not what it seems to be. Fantasy novels rely on a willing suspension of belief.  It is difficult to read such stories with a critical eye and enjoy them.  Ironically, I found George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones difficult to get into.  The writing is what I call “power writing”—full of bravado and flash.  A fantasy, it seems to me, should have a certain gentleness to the narrative. I’ve occasionally presented Boeotian Rhapsody, my Medusa novel, to publishers as a fantasy.  It really isn’t.  Magical realism, perhaps.  Fabulism maybe.  W...

Six unpublished novels sit before me on my laptop.  Okay, to be fair the first one is the “throw away” that all novelist wannabes have to write.  Probably the second one, too, if I’m to be entirely honest.  Novel four wasn’t that great, being a Nanowrimo effort.  The other three, however, I like. It’s a funny thing, how writers feel about their children.  Unlike our biological offspring, we are told to drown our darlings and make them suffer.  That applies to works as well as characters.  We are advised to throw away our first ten-thousand hours of work. Well, maybe not throw them away completely.  Experts—and we all have to respect experts—claim that it takes ten-thousand hours of doing anything artistic to become proficient.  That’s over two years of waking time completely devoted to the craft.  Most of us can’t afford more than a few hours of writing a week. It’s difficult to know how to measure success in writing.  ...

Writing is an activity with implications.  Many of us jot things down on a regular basis—reminders, tweets, stories, dissertations; people are frequently writing.  While letter writing may not be the practice that it used to be (although some of us still regularly write and mail letters) we know that the sacred code is that what we put in that envelope is private.  It is, guaranteed by the government, our own business.  That’s what makes a recent story of a trove of undelivered letters such an interesting tale. The postmasters of The Hague in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, kept a truck of undelivered mail.  Now academics are using high tech scanning devices to read the letters without opening them.  You can’t slander the dead. I do wonder, however, about private words.  Most of what we write on our computers, I suspect, will simply vanish some day.  Internet fame seems like it must be temporary.  Still, writing ...

As an erstwhile professor, I used to research and write academic papers.  As a professor outside the academy, I no longer have the opportunity.  My day job, however, takes me occasionally into the hallowed halls and I start to feel a little lonely for the academic publishing world. Sure, the papers are boring and read by maybe a dozen people, but I never had the difficulty of getting them published that I do with my fiction.  My non-pseudo-nym was fairly well known among colleagues and they knew, as a friend once said, “the author is as important as the story.”  In the fiction realm, I’m nobody. Recently I met with many professors.  The experience divided my loyalties.  Before meeting with them I had been making good progress on my latest K. Marvin Bruce project.  Since meeting with them I’ve been brooding over whether to try more academical writing.  So boring.  So dull.  Yet, I can get it published. It sort of makes me won...