K. Marvin Bruce

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...

A brand new notebook.  It's a thing of such exquisite beauty that I begin to weep.  The pen in my hand is nervous, like a first date.  Once I begin to write, this notebook will never be the same. The ideas flow, partly based on the medium chosen to channel them.  Any writer knows this.   Growing up before word processors or home computers, in a time when even typewriters were too expensive for families like mine, I came to adore paper.  In almost a mystical sense, I feel a growing thrill when faced with completely blank pages.  Writing can be so visceral, so physical.  I can get lost in it, as if I'm following the folds in my gray matter to places I never knew I had.   The results, whether any publishers like them or not, prove that I am a writer.  I have gone some place unexplored and have brought something new to light.  It may not survive.  No museum may want it.  It is, however, now part of the universe.   ...