K. Marvin Bruce

  So I’ve been reading about writing.   Or more properly, about publishing.   It’s really kind of a fascinating story.   The paperback novel, as we know it, is less than a century old.   It was essentially invented for soldiers during the Second World War.   In the economic downturn after war, it made for a cheaper way for people to buy books. There were lots of big publishers in the fifties and sixties, and then they started being bought up by large corporations.   They became much more bottom-line oriented.   And it became much harder to become a fiction author.   In reading about this, it really stands out that it was kind of an incestuous business.   Everybody in publishing knew everybody else.   You could still send in a manuscript without an agent.   You could be discovered—Stephen King didn’t have an agent for his first book.   Then things began to change. These days there are five very large publishers in English. ...

  The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time.   Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot.   Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group.   Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday.   I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare.   I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run.   And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined.   One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful.   They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only.   Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away.   They also met on Saturdays.   Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...