K. Marvin Bruce

Six unpublished novels sit before me on my laptop.  Okay, to be fair the first one is the “throw away” that all novelist wannabes have to write.  Probably the second one, too, if I’m to be entirely honest.  Novel four wasn’t that great, being a Nanowrimo effort.  The other three, however, I like. It’s a funny thing, how writers feel about their children.  Unlike our biological offspring, we are told to drown our darlings and make them suffer.  That applies to works as well as characters.  We are advised to throw away our first ten-thousand hours of work. Well, maybe not throw them away completely.  Experts—and we all have to respect experts—claim that it takes ten-thousand hours of doing anything artistic to become proficient.  That’s over two years of waking time completely devoted to the craft.  Most of us can’t afford more than a few hours of writing a week. It’s difficult to know how to measure success in writing.  ...

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...

With information available at lightning speed all around the world, publishing remains a very slow business.  One of the few jobs unavailable to computers or robots, the editor is a reading machine.  The editor is also a bottleneck. In many presses, once an editor accepts a book for publication, it will still need to go through the production process.  Even in this age of high technology, errors are waiting to creep in at every stage of transference, making proofreading necessary and slowing the process down. It is a lot less expensive to catch an error at the stage of a proof than it is after hundreds, or thousands of copies have been printed.  Even after the long wait for approval, it is an even longer wait until a book appears. Waiting is on my mind as I have my once accepted, frequently rejected novel under consideration with about six independent presses at the moment.  I used to be a believer in single submission only.  Life is too short ...

I recently read a zombie novel.  That’s not entirely true.  I recently finished a zombie novel that I had been reading since last autumn.  Maybe late summer. Monster books have always been among my guilty pleasures.  The monstrous captures the imagination like no other topic, filling me with boyish thrills, frissons of possibilities unimagined.  I read vampire novels (drawing the line at Twilight) and werewolf books, when they can be found, are even better. Zombies, however, just don’t seem to work for me.   It’s not that I have anything against zombies.  My first piece of published fiction was a zombie story.  The problem isn’t the topic, but the suspension of reality.  Zombies are believable enough.  In my story the zombie identity isn’t revealed until the end.  There’s a reason for that. In a novel, where the story stretches on over many, many pages, your rational mind creeps in and thinks, this is impossib...