K. Marvin Bruce

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, w...

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.  A...