K. Marvin Bruce

Unless you’re sexy, or already well-connected, the internet feels like high school all over again.  You want to be noticed, but you’re insecure, a bit shy, and lacking self-confidence.  You try putting yourself out there only to be rejected, and you crawl back into your book, where you feel safe. You’d think that the trauma, after all these years, might diminish a little.  Maybe it does for some people.  My career has turned into a train wreck and my efforts as a fiction writer haven’t exactly been welcomed with open arms.  But, I understand, one must build a platform. I have another life on the internet.  One where I don’t use a pen name.  In that internet world, where I’ve actually published two non-fiction books, nobody pays me much mind.  I’ve got a blog, a Twitter account, and a Goodreads account.  I tried to grow my Twitter following, and it has been very slow going. As K. Marvin Bruce, I also have this blog and a Twi...

Those of us who write are quite mad.  In more lucid moments we know it, but most of the time our reality is skewed.  There are any number of examples.  If you write, you know it to be true. I recently read a study of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.  Dick had drug addiction issues throughout his life, but he also experienced severe abandonment issues as a child.  As an adult he had mystical experiences that sound quite, well, mad. Whitley Strieber, who is still alive, has been subject to fits and mystical experiences throughout his life as well.  Some of his fiction is bizarre, but not as strange as his non-fiction.  The list could go on and on.  Writers see the world differently than others. We write and find that others don’t share our point of view.  We die and, if we’re lucky, then we become famous.  Those who made great statements in their fiction often began, and ended, obscure.  Poe was pilloried in h...