K. Marvin Bruce

Perhaps the most difficult thing about being a working writer is deciding how to spend the limited time you have to write.   Since I had a completely non-lucrative life as a non-fiction author while working in academia I have found those who decide whether to publish you or not often consider your last book and its sale track.   That can be bad news for those of us who were once college professors. It’s not impossible for an employed professor to become a novelist.   Vladimir Nabokov was an entomologist and yet because of literature professor after writing Lolita .   Umberto Eco was an academic when he broke out with The Name of the Rose .   Carl Sagan published Contact .   The list could go on, but need not.   You get the point.   It may be difficult, but not impossible. I’ve written five novels since earning my doctorate, and three non-fiction books.   Of these only one has been published, and it is my least favorite of all.  ...

It is a truism that if you're famous you’ll have no trouble publishing a book.  For instance, I’m currently reading Contact by Carl Sagan.  I’ve seen the movie, and in a moment of not having anything new on my fiction shelf, I went back to Contact , which I had started years ago. Not all books are thrill rides, of course.  I’m not really a thriller fan, but there’s a je ne sas quoi about most literary novels that keeps you coming back.  In Contact , it’s clear that the author is a scientist. Not that one has to be a literary professional to become a writer.  I think of Michael Critchton, who wrote several bestsellers, despite being a medical doctor by profession.  I often wonder how people like that get started. I’m not a literary professional either.  I have, however, finished six novels and had very little success getting any interest built in them.  I wrote Passion of the Titans when Clash of the Titans had been announced but b...