K. Marvin Bruce

My computer died.  While there’s no good time for that to happen, when you’re traveling and there are no Apple stores nearby is perhaps the worst such time.  I was able to beg, borrow and surf on friends’ machines, but since they didn’t know me as Marvin, well, access was limited. This is one of the problems with a dual identity.  Not that my inability to check my email had any impact on the stories/novel I’ve got out for consideration.  When my computer was replaced yesterday, I had no emails at all. Being computerless, as a writer, was a strange and interesting experience.  With one exception, my publications are all online.  The files are all electronic.  Even though I travel everywhere with a notebook, and a backup notebook, I was cut off from my own work. Now that I have a new computer, and a much diminished bank account, I was able to recover all my old files.  I use a Mac because a Mac is the only kind of computer to use. ...

This is the title of a story that Danse Macabre published some months ago.  I wrote it under the influence of Ray Bradbury, who, it must be understood, can take no blame for my admiration.  It used to be if you wrote like Bradbury you’d find a publisher.  Those days have gone. The story concerns a magic necktie.  The necktie in itself is a suggestive accessory.  Not unlike a noose, it often represents the cost of the business world.  It is also the article of clothing most often to fall into your soup or sauce and become utterly destroyed. In one of my classes I had a student who commented on a particular tie I wore.  This one was vibrant with primary colors—flashy for my personality—that my mother had bought me.  It went with nothing, so it went with everything.  A white shirt showed it off best. In the right light the tie seemed to move.  That was, I suppose, the genesis of this story.  A man finds a tie on an accide...