His short stories featuring “Minerva James,” a lawyer in 1960’s who uses wit and logic to solve cases have been published in all three of Dandelion Revolution Press’s previous anthologies! Mark says it best: “Minerva is always the smartest person in the room, often to the consternation of the men in that same room.” Let’s dive into the mind of the creator of Minerva James, and learn more about his writer process and future projects.
Mark Bruce is stardust, he is golden, he is a billion-year-old carbon (and he looks his age, too). Oh, and he’s a lawyer practicing in San Bernardino, California. His character Minerva James has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including three Dandelion Revolution Press collections, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. He lives in Barstow with a stuffed mermaid named Mariah and his writing support dragon, Ferdinand. You can read his adventures in writing at MarkBruceWriter.com.
1. At what point did you consider yourself a writer?
Unlike my licensing as a lawyer, which required three tedious years of law school and passing the bar, I was able to christen myself as a writer after the first story I wrote at age 12. Being a writer is the only vocation where you give yourself the licensing exam and pass when you decide you’re good enough. When I was in my early 20s and stationed overseas, I published a little short story in a small literary magazine. Then I told everyone else I was a writer. I figured I had the street cred then.
2. Give us a peek into your writing process.
Process? Ha ha ha ha ha…
I do everything. I write in longhand in notebooks. I sit at the computer and type (I learned to type in the Air Force and now can accurately type 125 words a minute). I run stories in my head, mostly fantasies about winning the World Series with a spectacular catch, but I also run my novels and short stories as movies. Bits of dialogue and scenes will come to me as I toss and turn in bed, so I’ll get up and write them down. Many of these scenes end up in my stories.
For the longest time I had a strict rule that I had to write at least one hour a day—often when I’m on a roll, that will extend to two or three hours. This last year, however, I seem to have fallen off the writing wagon. The only thing that’s spurred me to write regularly is National Novel Writing Month. I have a 14-year streak of finishing every November and I don’t want to break that.
3. How do you come up with your ideas? How do you beat writer’s block?
I don’t have writer’s block so much as I have writer’s fatigue. I’ve been at this game since I was 12 but only recently—in the last 5 years—have I really seen anything like success. And I was born long before you were, I promise.
I have lots and lots of ideas in various notebooks—I keep at least one notebook going all the time with stray ideas. And the ideas just come to me, no real organization to them. Often an idea for a story will come from my clients or fellow lawyers. I just finished a divorce trial for a woman who married her husband 40 years ago while he was in San Quentin on a murder rap. Needless to say, she lived to regret it. That woman will be my next short story.
4. What do you hope readers will get out of your short stories featured in DRP’s anthologies?
I am not going to save the world with my little mysteries. But I hope, other than being entertained, I can make the reader see a facet of life in a different way. For instance, in “Minerva James and the Goddess of the Dance,” Minerva’s client is a serious businesswoman with what some would call a shady past—she was an exotic dancer in her youth. But in the story the women who danced with her rally round her in her time of need. An unexpected sisterhood, if you will. My second wife was an exotic dancer and some of the stories she told me of her past are not what you would expect. She was a witness in a murder case and testified even though she was threatened. If you knew her, you wouldn’t be surprised—the woman is fierce.
I think finding the unexpected depth in people helps the reader realize that real life isn’t trapped in the clichés they’ve been led to believe.
5. What was the inspiration behind your stories featured in DRP’s anthologies?
I really, really don’t like the way women lawyers are usually depicted in mystery fiction. Even when written by women, these characters tend to be frivolous or oversexed, or angry or too worried about their man. I wanted to create a character who was representative of the remarkably resourceful and brilliant women lawyers I worked with and against. Minerva is always the smartest person in the room, often to the consternation of the men in that same room. When she came to me, Minerva told me that she hopes someday she will be such an icon that when a little girl is very smart people will call her a “little Minerva” as a compliment.
My late mother was a working woman in the 60s, and her stories of enduring sexist workplace problems also spurred me to have Minerva face the rampant sexism of the 1960s. My mother was an unsung hero. I write these stories for her, even though she’s in another plane of existence now. I hope wherever she is they get DRP anthologies.
6. What do you generally read? Why do you gravitate towards those stories?
If you put a book in front of me, I’ll read it. My son is an aerospace engineer who loves all these weird math books. When I go to his house, I’ll pick one up just out of curiosity. Of course, it’s like reading a book in a foreign language, but I still find them fascinating.
I read a lot of mystery books. I wish there were better mysteries being written these days. Far too many seem to be carbon copies of each other. The last original mystery detective I read was Flavia De Luce in “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie”—she’s an 11-year-old girl in post-World War II Britain who loves chemistry and solving crimes. She’s delightful.
I’ve always loved mysteries. Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers—the great puzzle mysteries with great characters. I’m not really a fan of “men’s” action books, like Jack Reacher—I was in the military as a young man, so when I read this kind of stuff with an ex-military guy who is depicted as a super fighter, it just seems ridiculous to me. I’ll take Hercule Poirot over Reacher any day.
7. In your opinion, what separates a good short story from a great short story?
A good short story will engage you with the plot and the characters. A great short story will make you sit on the couch for an hour after you’ve finished reading it asking yourself “what the hell just happened?”
8. What other creative projects are you working on? How can readers find your other writing (and future writings)?
In the 60s movie Yellow Submarine, John, Paul, George, and Ringo come across a furry little fellow who tells them he’s very busy writing his three novels, four symphonies and painting his latest masterpiece. He is, of course, the Nowhere Man. I can relate.
I have a novel, Minerva James and the Trial of Mars, with an agent right now and we’re beating down the doors of the publishers trying to get it into the world. I have two other Minerva novels outlined. I also have about six non-Minerva novels in various states of construction; several Minerva short stories that need to be finished; a non-fiction book about when I was fired from my job as a lawyer in which I cite the old joke that the difference between a dead skunk in the road and a dead lawyer in the road is that there are skid marks in front of the skunk; and a memoir about raising my brilliant son who happens to have ADHD. He now has other initials behind his name—Ph.D.
Oh, and did I mention the Christmas musical my friend Leslie and I have written and hope to stage as a reading in December?