K. Marvin Bruce

I know a real, live, tenured professor who believes in tulpa.  He once told me how a friend wrote a fiction story, only to have an improbable event from the story happen after it was finished.  It was not something over which he had any control. Tulpa is a concept from eastern religions that suggests a being of pure thought or imagination might take on reality.  Writers, who create characters all the time, are perhaps engaging in tulpa.  We are creating, literally, as well as figuratively. I like the concept.  Many writers know the sensation of the character who refuses to behave.  A person that you make up does not what you want her to do, but what you know she shouldn’t do.  It’s like having an adult two-year-old. This same professor friend once told me that ideas may be created by a collective consciousness, and writers are those sensitive enough to capture those ideas that are floating freely in the ether.  (To be fair, he didn’t ...

Writers explore the depths of humanity’s experience.  At the same time, there are topics that we aren’t allowed to plumb. Let me back up a bit.  When I started to teach myself about which literary magazines would accept what kinds of stories, I spent a lot of time reading the do’s and don’t’s of the editors.  Some won’t allow men to write with a woman’s voice or vice versa.  Others disallow sex scenes and some forbid topics without which Nabokov could never have written Lolita .  Write short, still others say, anything over 1000 words is too long. Being a compliant sort, I tried for a while to avoid those things that would get me into trouble.  When someone is established, however, I’ve noticed, they can break all the rules and get rich.  So why are topics forbidden? I know editors.  A good friend is one.  And editors are people with tastes and prejudices just like the rest of us.  The problem is, there are a limited number ...

Those few who read my fiction generally comment on my satire.  Those who actually know me might call it cynicism.  Whatever one may choose to label it, it is a sense that things in our entrepreneurial world just don’t make sense. I’ve held a number of jobs in my life and have come to realize that just about all of them have a single purpose: to help those above me get wealthy.  I’m a daydreamer, not a corporate climber.  And yet I wonder what might happen if wealth had to face reality. A number of years ago I read about a sitting president (I can’t remember who it was, but it was before Obama) who couldn’t even guess near the price of a loaf of bread.  Those above us, it seems, have forgotten what it feels like here on the bottom. When the swamp monsters move in, those of ample means don’t know what to do.  Discrimination is frowned upon.  Yet, clearly, they can’t let monsters be monsters.  And so “Famous Neighbors” ( Defenestration )...

I have a confession to make, and it may be shocking coming from a writer.  I’ve never used drugs.  I had a brother who did and some of what happened scared the shit out of me.  That, and my father was a professional alcoholic. “The First Time,” recently published on Dali’s LoveChild , is based on a couple of reflections.  A while back a friend invited me to try hallucinogenic mushrooms, as a spiritual experience.  I politely refused, but wondered what would have happened if I had. You see, growing up in an alcoholic family, you never know what is normal.  I thought the kinds of things involving guns and beer were typical.  You mean you don’t do this at your house?  I went to a bar for the first time before I was five. But my concern is deeper.  I don’t know what reality is.  If I tried shrooms, would I become trapped in an alternate reality?  What if they never wore off?  Sometimes I’m just not very brave. ...

Like most Americans, I don’t understand cricket.  I do know there is a batter and what we would call a pitcher who “bowls” a ball to try to knock down wickets behind the batter.  If the bowler knocks down all three wickets with successive balls, it is called a hat trick. Hat tricks are, by definition, rare events.  According to the venerable Oxford Dictionaries on the somewhat less venerable Internet, the bowler was given a hat to commemorate the feat, thus making it a “hat” trick.  Now any three unexpected successes are called by that moniker. I’ve been submitting to many publishers from my copious backlog of short fiction for about five years now.  For the first four years of my efforts I only found two online magazines willing to put any of my stories out there ( Danse Macabre and Jersey Devil Press ).  Over forty other mags turned me down. Then, out of nowhere, a hat trick.  Three submissions accepted in a row.  I don’t expect th...

I often wonder how many people read my stuff.  That’s the thing about the World-Wide Web.  You’ll never know.  Hits, yes, may be counted.  But who really reads? My writing is metaphorical.  Unapologetically so.  To gather by past responses, this is not a popular or desirable thing.  It is, however, what I do.  I began publishing fiction in 2009.  (I’ve been writing fiction since the 1970s.)  Rejections fell like rain. Over the past month, strangely, there have been a few more open editors.  I feel confused.  Within a three-week period I had acceptances from Dali’s LoveChild (an excellent new surrealist literary magazine) and Deep Water  (a more established, darker venue).  I even had a maybe from Defenestration . I’m a realist, despite my fiction.  I know many more rejections will come.  I still regularly get them.  I submitted a truly creepy story to a magazine that was rejected in less t...

Thanksgiving seems to be an appropriate time to express my gratitude to the editors of Calliope .  Apart from being (to date) the only literary magazine to actually print one of my stories (others, I am grateful, post them online), the editors have nominated “Initiating an Apocalypse” for a Pushcart Prize. I’m enough of a realist to know that my chances of actually winning a prize are slim, but it is nice when a story previously rejected many times is seen to have some potential.  I suspect, but I may be wrong, that writers don’t submit material unless they believe it is good enough to publish. Still, being declined repeatedly wears not only on the ego, but on the soul itself.  It’s easy to feel like a poser or mountebank trying to pass yourself off as a writer.  Still, somewhere deep down, we believe. At times I seriously question whether I should keep at this at all.  The ideas, however, burst out regardless.  Either I will catch them or they...

Some days I can’t seem to find the groove.  I wake up a couple hours before heading to work so that I can write, and some days I just stare blankly at the screen.  As if my mind were allergic to ideas. Then there are the times the Muses trip over each other, trying to crowd into that limited space I call my mind.  I’ll start one story, then an idea for another will come and crowd out the first.  That which seemed so damned urgent can now wait until I get these words down.  But then another idea bursts in, unannounced. I wonder if other writers experience this.  I once knew a media professor who smoked a pipe.  He once said that if he couldn’t find the tobacco he liked he could resort to cigars.  “Or even cigarettes.”  I’ve never smoked.  I don’t see the need to, but his words reminded me of the behavior of my Muses. Some days I work on my novels (my pipe).  I prefer to write long, and I have completed six novels over th...

It was one of the nicest rejection letters I’ve received.  “It’s not you.  It’s me.”  You get the picture.  I’ve lost track of how many times this book has been rejected.  A friend of mine in publishing tells me that publishers are hungry for content.  I’ve got six pretty good novels lying around with very little interest shown. Perhaps I suck as a writer.  I don’t really think so, though.  You see, i read a lot.  On the order of three hours a day a lot.  Some of what I read sucks.  I recognize suckiness.  I don’t produce it. And yet when I submit to a publisher they want three months to consider my work before rejecting it.  You’d think I’d have learned the lesson by now.  If they don’t write back the next day, so excited they can’t stay in their seats, I’ve failed to sway them.  At least that’s how I imagine it must go. This particular novel—the first I’ve seriously tried to publish—is an orphan....

Writing is kind of like sex.  It feels wonderful, but it is really difficult to manage with someone watching you.  I live in a small place, with a partner.  I have to get up very early to write, before my significant other is awake. Even if someone is not paying attention, but is in the same room, I can’t perform.  Writing is a solitary activity.  Tricky for those of us who can’t afford a house, or at least a large apartment. My writing partner Fantasia asked me recently if I have a special place.  Ever since reading Little Women many years ago, I’ve often thought about the habits of writers.  I’ve never had enough money to afford a domicile with a special place.  I don’t have a study or den.  I have a chair that I favor in the living room. This chair affords me a view of all other rooms without doors in my apartment.  I can see if anyone else can see me.  If a door is open.  If I am not alone.  I really want...

One of my friends is an established author.  He has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list multiple times although he isn’t really a household name.  He writes big books.  Some topping a thousand pages.  He won’t compromise. On my nightstand at the moment is a first novel of some four hundred pages.  Prior to it, several of my last bedtime projects involved first books of similar or greater size.  Big books.  Something into which you could sink your teeth. Pardon the cliche. Recently some literate friends were saying how much they love descriptive writing.  Thing is, description takes word counts.  Like most writers struggling to find publishers, one of the first obstacles I face is reflected in the adage “write short to write long.” Implied witticism aside, this can be a problem.  I’m the first to admit that stories of my own that I’ve pruned down often appear better for the effort.  To bring some more comple...

“Infatuation, Technically,” was technically published on the Danse Macabre blog this past week.  This brief tale evolved out of experience working in a office where women are as difficult to get to know as they are arresting.  But the story isn’t really about that. If it weren’t for technology I wouldn’t be a published author (if what I can be called is such).  I make my submissions online and I receive my electronic voice online.  I look at maps online and I haven’t touched a phonebook in years. But still.  I’m still not convinced all of this technology is a good thing.  “Infatuation, Technically” is about the love of technology.  The human element is gone.  I could be dating a clone and wouldn’t even know it.  This food I’m eating never occurred in nature.  That fly buzzing around my head is a drone. A friend told me they are now printing cells with 3-D printers.  What if we haven’t found all the dimensions yet? ...

I write for mood.  This was an epiphany I had this week.  I started writing long before I started reading about writing.  What I wrote reflected who I’d been reading—mostly Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury. Contemporary writing gurus indicated that we should cut to the chase.  The modern attention span isn’t comfortable with the building of mood.  They keep a finger on the mouse at all times, my friend, ready to click off your page if a yawn even starts. And this sickness has infected editors.  We want the quick fix.  Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.  Literary foreplay is so twentieth century.  And the millennia before that.  The earliest recorded stories, like the Gilgamesh Epic, are repetitive and build to the action slowly.  We don’t have time for that any more. Many hours of my childhood were whiled away behind a Ray Bradbury collection of stories.  Some were little more than prose tone poems, but they were beautif...

A rare day off work.  What to do?   I have been writing fiction since I was in middle school.  There was a hiatus of maybe a decade and a half during which I was learning “higher education” ways of expressing myself.  But the call to fiction was too strong to ignore. One of the most influential people in my life was a teacher whom I never had in class.  He was the faculty advisor to the creative writing club.  In high school he urged me to try to publish my work, but publication was too scary a step, and I didn’t know how.  Fact is, I still don’t.  Only now I’m old enough that that doesn’t stop me. Mr. Milliken said that the key to writing was constancy.  Write at least fifteen minutes a day.  In some form or other, I’ve been doing that for decades.  I realized on my day off that I had dozens of stories half-finished, some of which I couldn’t remember writing.  I also had dozens finished that I have never tried to ...

As the author of six novels (none published) Banned Book Week, which begins tomorrow, always has a special appeal.  People have been writing for over four thousand years, and it might seem that there’s little left to say that won’t offend someone.  So I celebrated Banned Book Week with abandon. There’s no official “western canon” of banned books.  Suffice it to say that if you have a favorite, it’s probably on somebody’s list.  Although we gladly watch televisions shows frothing over with sex and violence, if you try to put it in a book, someone will object.  Loudly. Many cultural heroes, of the literary sort, have spent a stint or two on the banned book lists.  We feel that our children shouldn’t read such things.  They might act out the violence or adult situations and who’s going to clean up after all that?  It is easier to prevent them reading. I recall RIF.  Reading Is Fundamental.  It was a program in full swing when I...

I admire the courage of anyone who publishes fiction.  As a sometime writer of the same, I know that, should anyone read my paltry offerings, I open myself to criticism and critique.  It’s a bit of me on each page I scribble. Still, often I read material that makes me cringe.  Tips from writers who succeeded tell us what to avoid, yet some fiction writers still seem unaware.  Novels full of cliches, telling—not showing, and telling yet again, over-written and lacking subtlety make their way into my hands.  I want to bury my eyes in a box of salt. But there are virtues in such reading.  Perhaps the greatest is that poor writing reminds me that I don’t know how my work appears to others.  I recently read a novel that tried me sorely.  I realized as I read, however, that I was learning on each page. Many of us learn to write by reading good writers.  If we read enough, we take on the successful habits of our idols.  Their caden...

I’m not afraid of electronic publication.  Despite the fact that it could all be wiped out by a comet’s tail or power surge, it is clearly the way of the future.  Some of my earliest stories have, in fact, already disappeared as servers have shut down, reverting rights along with words. My earliest pieces appeared in Danse Macabre , a literary journal that seems to get what I’m trying to do.  Certainly the vast majority of literary magazines don’t “get” me, as I’ve had a great deal of trouble finding editors who’ll give my tales a chance.  I was pleased, then, to see myself as a part of two anthologies by Hammer and Anvil Press. Hammer and Anvil—a most appropriate name—is the book-publishing side of Danse Macabre ’s Adam Henry Carrière, the first editor to take a chance on my fiction.  I discovered two of my stories in anthologies, and I am very pleased that they still have a little staying power. Stories are memes that we cast out into the universe...

This is the title of a story that Danse Macabre published some months ago.  I wrote it under the influence of Ray Bradbury, who, it must be understood, can take no blame for my admiration.  It used to be if you wrote like Bradbury you’d find a publisher.  Those days have gone. The story concerns a magic necktie.  The necktie in itself is a suggestive accessory.  Not unlike a noose, it often represents the cost of the business world.  It is also the article of clothing most often to fall into your soup or sauce and become utterly destroyed. In one of my classes I had a student who commented on a particular tie I wore.  This one was vibrant with primary colors—flashy for my personality—that my mother had bought me.  It went with nothing, so it went with everything.  A white shirt showed it off best. In the right light the tie seemed to move.  That was, I suppose, the genesis of this story.  A man finds a tie on an accide...

The giddying heights, the abysmal lows.  Being published, being rejected.  Opposites make excellent fodder for stories. I was cheered by the arrival of Calliope 144, Summer 2014.  My story, “Initiating an Apocalypse,” won third place in the contest for this issue, and, among other things, represents the first time my fiction has actually appeared in print form.  Heights! The story is, as the editor instantly recognized, satire.  The plot revolves around a professor who lost his job and who wants the world to share his misery.  Having studied ancient religions (the protagonist is based on a friend of mine) our hero calls on the ancient gods to help exact his revenge. In the background here is Zoroastrianism, perhaps the oldest continually practiced religion in the world.  The great god of the Zoroastrians was Ahura Mazda.  Since the world appeared to be governed by opposites, he had a foe who was totally evil: Angra Mainyu.  Zara...

In my unguarded (i.e., optimistic) moments, I sometimes wonder if underselling oneself is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  For example, sending your writing only to small publishers might lead to small returns.  The big guys are scary, however. Sometimes it seems a small press can’t handle big ideas.  Some fiction goes beyond the usual need to tell a story and contains a much deeper message.  After all, all books are farewell letters to the world.  We want to say something important. Although I keep a spreadsheet with my submissions, sometimes stories get lost in the mix.  Once in a while I’ll stumble upon one that I’d forgotten, an orphan of my feverish imagination.  I wonder why I never tried to get it published.  Then I look at my spreadsheet. It is kind of like an idea graveyard.  Big ideas, small ideas.  Lying side by side in unmarked graves since, never having been published, they’ll never be read by anyone other than thei...