K. Marvin Bruce

I have another blog.   That one, under my real name, has fewer readers than this one.   Unlike the piece you’re reading at the moment, this is an occasional note.  I post on the other blog daily.   Interestingly I’ve had publishing professionals tell me that’s what they like to see.  Funny. Perhaps it doesn’t seem like much, but coming up with discrete, intelligent (I hope!) things to say every day, for over a decade, should demonstrate willingness to work hard.   When I started the other blog I had lots of followers.   Now I have few. I know, I know!   If I were in your place I’d be saying, “Maybe your writing sucks.”   Maybe it does.   Maybe it doesn’t.   The point is without someone willing to help we all spin in obscurity. Someone I know online recently published a book on a topic in which I also publish.   He has tons of followers.   I don’t.   He also has a university post and thus an institut...

Is it possible to write too much?  I remember asking a famous scholar once about something he had written.  He couldn’t remember it.  In his defense he said, “You know, you write so much.” I’m not a young man, and I think I’m finally starting to see what he meant.  In addition to this blog, I write another under my actual name.  I’ve been doing for about six years.  The other day I recalled a somewhat funny thing I’d written (or so it seemed to me) but I couldn’t find it. I tried searching the blog with every possible keyword I could imagine.  Nothing helped.  I couldn’t remember what I was writing about, or even the exact wording of the phrase.  It was a powerful image, though, and I wanted to find it.  Even in these days of “lasers in the jungle” you can’t find a phrase when you need to. Maybe the problem is I write too much.  I write every day.  I pretty much have since I was a teenager.  My advice to...