K. Marvin Bruce

At least it looked like a castle.   Weary with fatigue, Terah lacked the motivation to cross the bridge.   The energy required to lift even one worn boot was too much.   He stood staring across the expanse that married New Jersey to Pennsylvania along I-80.   Probably because the Appalachian Trial, this interstate bridge had a pedestrian lane for vagabond hikers like himself.   Back when he was at least partially employed, he’d driven through the Gap many times.   The dramatic cliffs along curves that teetered above the Delaware River would be an inspiring sight, he always thought, if one didn’t have to keep one’s eyes on the road.   Now that he stood here, oppressed by the magnitude of nature and his own insignificance, he rubbed his eyes on a dirty sleeve.   A castle?   In Pennsylvania? Back in his Scotland days he’d visited many medieval castles.   America was just being “discovered”—“exploited” was the more accurate word—when the ...

There’s a certain freedom in being obscure.   Like with the murder.   Her name might’ve been Danielle.   That’s what she said, but then again, sex was seldom a matter of being honest.   Terah had met her in the classroom and although he knew the trope was tired—he’d been a writer—he’d also been a professor.   He’d known the subtle pressure of constantly refreshing populations of young coeds.   And hiring someone as an adjunct was an invitation to become a drifter. He wasn’t a predator.   He was just weak.   Besides, grandfathers on both sides had been teachers that’d married their students.   It’d been common in those days, and what made some time-honored family traditions illegal?   Shouldn’t that itself be illegal?   As long as both parties are mature and willing.   Such thoughts kept him company on the long January walk. Once out of the poisonous orbit of New York City, New Jersey was a pretty state.   Here in the ...

The cruel beauty of winter settled like frozen ashes on the ruined church.   There was something obscene about seeing faith exposed in such a naked state—once warmly felt and capable of erecting soaring cathedrals now reduced to failing to pay the mortgage on a relatively modest chapel in a small town until some squatter’s fire claimed it.   The half-hearted efforts of the weary Stanton Station fire-fighting volunteers left it smoldering on Epiphany. Terah Economy kept far from the scene, knowing it wouldn’t be difficult to trace the conflagration’s origin.   He’d never burn down a church intentionally.   His former career had been precariously canted in that direction, like a tallship in a typhoon.   Being homeless in Stanton Station was easier than it had been in New York City.   The handouts could be better in Midtown, and even for educated derelicts like himself the homeless shelters seemed less appealing than an appliance box over a subway vent on ...

I’ve been thinking that this blog could use a little attention.   My problem is—well, one of my problems—I lead a double life.   I write fiction under a pseudonym because my real nym is tied to a respectable job.   So it goes. One of the solutions to my double life is that I could start putting some fiction on this blog.   Good idea or no?   I have a novel on which I’m working and it won’t likely find a publisher, so I could start pasting it here, in serial form. On the other hand of my double life I have a nonfiction book under my nonfiction name that is currently due at the publisher’s.   I need to spend time on that too, and I have a job.   And the lawn isn’t going to mow itself. So I’m thinking that instead of neglecting this poor, but truly loved, child of a blog, maybe I could feed it fiction.   That would at least keep it alive.   Right now it’s like a cactus, getting water only a few times a year.   Is that a mixed m...

Publishers, in a time of plague and pandemic, have a difficult time.   People aren’t really interested in much else beyond the crisis of the moment.   Sometimes I wonder if it’s bad form to seek publication at a time such as this. Fiction, I remind myself, is truer than fact.   And it’s a great release from the daily stresses of living amid COVID-19.   A friend of mine who’s an editor told me that novels are selling well.   Nonfiction not so much. For the last several weeks I’ve heard nothing from the agents I queried all the way back in January.   Many of them are in New York City, the epicenter, it always seems, of American drama.   So many people living so close together.   How could they be thinking about fiction? It’s the future.   Fiction, that is.   Those of us who indulge in speculative fiction know that it is a coping mechanism.   It teaches us how to handle “what if…?”   The coronavirus is a big “what if…...

The search for an agent is entering its fourth month and I often wonder just what classics we’d have to live without if Herman Melville or Charlotte Bronte had received email after email saying “it just doesn’t have that ‘have to have’ feeling.”   We’d be literary beggars. The true irony of this is I know people who work in the publishing industry.   They say that someone with my background should be a no-brainer for an agent.   When I was a young man a friend accused me of writing too much like Melville.   “Nobody writes like that anymore,” he said.   His father-in-law was a writer. Melville was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne.   Their works are endlessly remade in a more modern idiom.   Electrum may look like gold, but it’s not the same.   Why not search for the real thing? People learn how to do things from watching the masters.   While it may have been the glib Doc Savage and Dark Shadows pulps that led me to reading, I soon...

This is the feeling that keeps me writing.   The email that accepts a story for publication. Although it might not seem like it, I’ve been writing fiction since about 1974.   Those first stories, scrawled on a school tablet, were my way of coping.   After my mother’s remarriage, a move, and a verbally abusive step-father came into the picture, I began writing. My first published stories (which I don’t count) were in my high school newspaper.   I won a state-wide essay contest.   I’d been bitten by the bug.   For reasons I can’t go into here, I stopped submitting fiction until about 2006. Now I’m trying to catch up.   Literary magazines have a backlog.   So do I.   A story I’d tried to publish a couple of times, “Friday before Senior Year,” has just been accepted by The Corner Bar .   I’m thrilled and pleased. You see, I’ve been working on a continuation of that story.   Not the main character, but a secondary charac...