K. Marvin Bruce

I seldom get sick.  I’ve been told this is one of the boons of middle age—the maladies of childhood pass and it take more to bring you down.  A swift-moving bug, however, recently caught me and kept me awake all night thinking the end had come. Ironically, I associate being sick with writing.  I was  a sickly child.  Skinny and frail I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and actually missed a large portion of seventh grade because of recurring bouts of illness.  I attempted to write my first novel in such a febrile state. A science-fiction fan, I began scrawling about a ship at sea attached by some weird creature.  My novel didn’t have much of a plot and my skills were, well, juvenile.  A couple more false starts accompanied me through high school, but few people beyond my two closest friends, knew I wrote. Of course, I don’t have to be sick to write.  In this workaday world, however, a brief illness affords an opportun...