K. Marvin Bruce

I’ve got a bandage on my thumb.  It’s because of my overweening love of books.  To write well one must read even better.  Then the book stacks begin to grow. I head to the basement.  I used to live in a four-bedroom house, but it was owned by the institution that intimated my services were no longer required.  After that I’ve moved to a succession of two-bedroom apartments and all that implies. In the basement lie my dormant power tools and scraps of wood.  Back when we lived in “the house” my basement buzzed with the making of cheap, pine furniture.  Mostly bookshelves.  Here in the apartment the basement is shared and space is at a premium.  Some people don’t like finding sawdust all over their stuff. The result has been stacks of books growing up beside the existing shelves.  I don’t mind that so much, since a background of books is always visually interesting.  But then I went to get a book from the bottom of ...

Creativity, as we who write know, begets creativity.  I was reminded of this by having lunch with another writer in New York City.  I use “writer” intentionally since major publishers have studiously avoided both of us, but we carry on, nonetheless. New York has no dearth of writers’ groups and workshops and seminars.  They work best for those who live in the city (unlike yours truly) and who have some spare cash (also unlike yours truly).  Still, meeting with other creatives is what makes our work work. Like the vast majority of writers, I work for a living.  My job, with the added commute, takes up about 90 percent of every waking hour of the work week.  My time for writing adds up to less than five hours per Monday-through-Friday, a pretty sad statistic.  Meeting with other writers has even less than that. Using a nom de plume , I suppose, doesn’t help.  Some of my writer colleagues know who K. Marvin Bruce is, but most do not....

Writing is a lonely activity.  The end goal is often community, though.  You exchange the loneliness for a book deal and lots of people read your work.  In theory.  For those who don’t get published, is the loneliness for nothing? To me, writing is its own reward.  It is a crying shame that other people won’t read it, but it is my personal cry against being forgotten.  I don’t hang out with friends, so read my writing. The world’s a busy place with work demanding it’s 99 percent of flesh and little time is left besides to do what one wants.  Weekends are for errands.  Or friends.  Or writing. Writing for me is all about generating friends.  I’m a nice guy—you’ll have to take my word for that, but it’s true—but I’m also shy.  I watch other people.  I write about what I see.  What I imagine happens among friends. The results may not be sparkly, but I notice the grit on the sidewalk shines too.  I’ve alw...

The best advice writers give aspiring writers is this: read.  Read a lot.  The thing about our species is that we learn by watching what others do.  To write is to read. Thing is, I’m an eclectic reader.  And my writing, like a snowball, grows from contact with other words.  I read literary fiction, I write literary fiction.  I read horror, I write horror.  I read humor, I write humor.  My promiscuous reading leads to the sin of eclectic writing. How do I know it’s a sin?  The editors tell me so.  The great priestly gatekeepers who hold the means of recognition in their genre-stained hands.  Nobody knows what to make of the cross-genre man.  The transgender are fine.  Encouraged even.  But beware the cross-genre man. As I go sinning across the internet, reading a little of this and a little of that, the snowman I’m building starts to look maybe a bit like that of Pig Pen.  Did I mention I read childr...

What makes a story scary?  I suspect that the answer depends on the asker.  You see, I think of my stories as scary.  Whether other people do, I don’t know. When I look for a scary story I’m not looking for gore.  Properly speaking, I’m not looking for fear either.  Mood, creepiness, and the strange are far more appealing.  Frisson at the atmosphere.  Poe, I suspect, isn’t too scary these days.  He knew how to set a mood, though. I recently read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”  I’ve heard a lot about this story and since it is still under copyright I had to find a book that contained it.  It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Don’t take me wrong—I am a fan of Shirley Jackson.  She was able to deliver as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle show.  “The Lottery,” however, didn’t scare me.  It was interesting, a nice short story, but not fearful. I find my hackles rising...

Ten percent, in the context of the Bible, is a tithe.  The old laws say that you owe God ten percent of your income.  Some religious people today still pay it. I was reading an article recently that featured another ten percent.  This applied to writers.  Although an unscientific survey—including information from Duotrope—this article suggested the acceptance rate of fiction writers is ten percent. That means, and I’m no math guy, that a piece has to be submitted an average of ten times before it is accepted somewhere.  This helps explain, but not assuage, my lack of success when it comes to getting published.  It’s normal. This has been on my mind lately since  Interview with the Gorgon  is getting more than ripe.  I stopped trying to find publishers some five years ago when it was under contract with Vagabondage Press.  They took a long time killing it—with no kill fee—leaving me in ...

How many novels must one man write, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, before you can call him an author?  I’ve completed six, none published, and I’ve got another well under way.  My business card, however, nowhere indicates that I’m an author. Being a writer is more than an occupation.  It’s an identity.  Like the vast majority of writers, I work for a living.  Long hours.  Long commute.  Heavy eyelids.  Sloped shoulders.  Weary sighs.  My boss thinks of me as an employee.  I think of myself as a writer gathering information. For me, there’s an ethics about it all.  I spend a lot of time reading.  Years, if I add up all the hours.  Am I not morally required to give something back?  I’ve written, sweated over, edited, and polished my novels.  Yet they sit on my hard drive seen by my eyes only and the even harder eyes of alabaster editors. Such is a writer’s life.  I’m not really looking for th...