Pay Per Back Writer

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. All I could think was—if I were one of them, I’d want to write it down so people could know what happened.

Literature, although fiction, is very true. In my case anyway, the things I write about have happened, in some form, to someone. That someone often finds his fingers on the keyboard. Without fantasy, I’m nothing.

Writing is a place for me to do the things I’ve never done. Nor will be able to do. I’m married, steadily so, and yet, dare I confess, my mind wonders what it would be like to start it all over again. What if I had been raised without the fear of Hell?

Would I have done anything differently? Would I still have been a writer? Would I have ever been paid for the job that takes just as much time as the one that my business card declares is who I am? Would K. Marvin Bruce every have had a single hit?

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Working Through It

The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time. Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot. Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group. Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday. I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare. I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run. And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined. One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful. They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only. Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away. They also met on Saturdays. Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...

Patterns

There’s a pattern I’m noticing. For fiction publishers. Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle. Part of the reason is the pattern. Lots of websites list publishers. The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in. That’s the kiss of death. Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested. I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns. This too is a pattern. Back to the smaller presses. I check many lists. What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic. It’s literary but it’s weird. Publishers don’t know what to do with it. If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it. The pattern includes writers who never get discovered. Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my wor...

Creative Righting

Rejection of my writing is a rejection of my imaginative world. That’s why I was cheered by the acceptance of one of my stories this week. That makes number 31. I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately, even as nonfiction book number 6 is going to press. The ideas are still there, and bizarre as ever, but publishing venues just aren’t welcoming. The other day I had lunch with a professor whose wife is also a professor. She just had her first novel published, and so he pointed me to her indie publisher. I went to their website to learn that they’re closed to submissions. I have to admit that my latest accepted story, “Creative Writing Club,” was probably given the green light because I know the editor. That seems like a pretty dicey way to get any notice, doesn’t it? You have to know the right people even in the low circulation world. My fiction is difficult to classify. It’s got speculative elements to it. ...

K. Marvin Bruce

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