K. Marvin Bruce

In my unguarded (i.e., optimistic) moments, I sometimes wonder if underselling oneself is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  For example, sending your writing only to small publishers might lead to small returns.  The big guys are scary, however. Sometimes it seems a small press can’t handle big ideas.  Some fiction goes beyond the usual need to tell a story and contains a much deeper message.  After all, all books are farewell letters to the world.  We want to say something important. Although I keep a spreadsheet with my submissions, sometimes stories get lost in the mix.  Once in a while I’ll stumble upon one that I’d forgotten, an orphan of my feverish imagination.  I wonder why I never tried to get it published.  Then I look at my spreadsheet. It is kind of like an idea graveyard.  Big ideas, small ideas.  Lying side by side in unmarked graves since, never having been published, they’ll never be read by anyone other than thei...

Gothic is a difficult word to define.  Although much of what I’ve published, in my little way, has a dark humor to it, my favorite writing genre is Gothic.  A backlit, ruined castle with a raven winging through an overcast sky, with a leafless tree in the foreground infuses me with inexplicable paroxysms of wonder. Summer can be a difficult time for those of us who would easily live in an eternal autumn.  Right now  the sun is shining and it feels like things might be okay after all.  So today I’ll give my tips to having a Gothic day, even in summer. Select a dark and gloomy morning to awake before sunrise.  Since I haunt my chilly apartment halls frequently at 3:00 a.m., I know such days come even in the summer. Take a long bath with steam rising from the surface of the gray water.  (This works best on a chilly morning.)  Preferably do this in a claw-footed steel tub.  Light a few candles. Breakfast lightly, trying to mainta...