K. Marvin Bruce

Sometimes it is all I can countenance even to consider submitting a piece of fiction for publication.  You know, I always thought artists were sensitive people, but these days we’re told to have thick skins—not to take rejection personally.  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like what you’ve spent hours and hours creating, honing, and polishing.  It’s nothing personal.” My day job is a professor at a nondescript college.  I still do research now and again, and like my fiction it is generally rejected before somebody else picks it up and says its worth a look.  Sometimes it is said even to be good. I wrote a scholarly book some years back.  I sent it around to publishers who didn’t like it for various reasons, and so it languished while I moved on to other things.  Recently three publishers approached me about it, expressing an interest.  Ah, editors!  Ye are such a fickle breed! Fiction, however, is far more personal.  It is mined from deep within the mind, revealing aspects of the

I know many editors.  They are always hungry for good material, but in the course of their duties they have to turn quite a few writers away.  Some of the writers, I’m assured, are just this side of insane.  Some have probably never even considered suicide. Editors are sometimes a writer’s worst enemy.  I know deep in my confused web of consciousness that I am a writer.  I have written fiction with a pathological insistence since before my middle school days.  Six novels bear my name.  Not one has merited publication. I wonder about the ethics of editors.  Who made them the gatekeepers of what is worthy of living or dying?  Nine years of my life were spent in higher education, terminating in a Ph.D. that bears no street cred.  How am I to convince an editor I’m no slouch?  Disposable. Anyone with server space and a few extra hours a week can be an editor.  Yes, for just a little storage space, you too can turn others down.  Feel like the big guy.  I’ll just crawl bac