Confession, they say, is good for the soul. So I’m over fifty and haven’t broken through to the paid writers’ club. I write under a pseudonym. I love taboo topics.
To be a writer, I’m told, you have to get out and promote your stuff. I wonder how you do that with a false identity. Mine is a matter of necessity. Although I’m half-a-century on, I have family members way ahead of me. They don’t know what I do with my free time.
My family tend to be conservative Christians. There are some words I’ve never heard uttered in my humble homestead. Words that, if you want to be a realistic writer, you’ve got to use. Not to mention the ideas that the Bible strictly forbids.
I live in my head. My daily existence is unremarkable. That’s one reason that I write. The other day I was reading about some people, in real life, stranded in an isolated location. They had to do what they could to survive. All I could think was—if I were one of them, I’d want to write it down so people could know what happened.
Literature, although fiction, is very true. In my case anyway, the things I write about have happened, in some form, to someone. That someone often finds his fingers on the keyboard. Without fantasy, I’m nothing.
Writing is a place for me to do the things I’ve never done. Nor will be able to do. I’m married, steadily so, and yet, dare I confess, my mind wonders what it would be like to start it all over again. What if I had been raised without the fear of Hell?
Would I have done anything differently? Would I still have been a writer? Would I have ever been paid for the job that takes just as much time as the one that my business card declares is who I am? Would K. Marvin Bruce every have had a single hit?
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