K. Marvin Bruce

Being a working writer means living with inherent contradictions.  For fifty weeks of the year daily life involves awaking between 3:00 and 3:30 a.m., writing for half an hour, and catching a bus to over eight hours of work in New York City.  Then riding the bus back home again in time for supper and bed.  I’m not complaining, just observing.  That’s what writers do. That lifestyle—constantly tired, anxious, and pressed for time to get the mundane chores done (paying bills, balancing the checkbook, taking out the recycling)—wears me down like a grindstone.  When the weekend comes I sleep an extra half hour or so and, although refreshed, I awake without the urgency that frames five days a week.  It’s a crisis. Every year I save up enough vacation days to take off between Christmas and New Year’s.  As a former professor this is a no-brainer.  In my industry (publishing) there’s no such thing as an emergency.  Nobody dies if a book is released a week later than scheduled.  Even s

The ghost story, as we know it, was originally associated more with Christmas than Halloween.  That makes sense, since the solstice is darker than the equinox.  Both days stand as transitions—Halloween is the beginning of the darkness, and Christmas is midnight. If you’re like me you may have comfy memories of childhood holidays.  That snug and warm feeling of being at home, well-stocked with food against the cold outside.  The hope of presents and a day of not worrying about the realities outside. Nightmares, however, know no holidays.  I awake in the dark and the light is but a mere sliver of the day.  Long before dinnertime the sun has set again.  Breakfast and supper are in the dark.  Is it any wonder the ghosts linger around the Christmas tree? My first published story, now on a defunct website, was the 2009 winner of the prix d’écriture de Noël in Fiction in Danse Macabre .  A scary Christmas story?  This was what gave me the courage to continue to try publication. 

It’s always something.  At the beginning of November it was depression over the results of the election.  Creatives everywhere mourned.  Then I had to be out of town.  Then last weekend I had to put the plastic over the windows.  Weekends are endangered species. The first casualty of this loss of time is my creative writing.  I tend to spend my weekends trying feverishly to catch up with the ideas that have flitted through my head all week long.  The mesh on my mental butterfly-net is too loose, however, and they tend to get away. Saturday comes and goes.  Sunday quickly follows.  Monday I’m back in the office wondering how a human being can put up with such pressure of unexpressed ideas.  I carry a little notebook in my pocket everyday and am so busy on weekends that I don’t even open it. I’m not complaining here.  I’m also sure that I’m far from unique when it comes to working writers who spend their days commuting, working, and generally trying to make a living.  These