K. Marvin Bruce

Can creativity be taught?  I’m not sure, but it certainly can be cultivated.  My friend Steve recommended Edward de Bono’s book Lateral Thinking .  I see it was published several decades ago, but it has me thinking about thinking. We are encouraged, indeed, compelled by logic to follow a linear, or in de Bono’s words, vertical approach to thinking.  One of the characteristics of this structure is that each step along the way must be unerringly right for the next step to work. Creativity, de Bono insists, uses both vertical thinking and lateral thinking.  Lateral thinking is the process of withholding judgment so that numerous alternatives might be considered.  No matter how irrational. De Bono isn’t writing particularly for writers.  His book was for teachers, primarily of younger students, giving them suggestions and exercises to increase lateral thinking ability.  While not everything might apply, some key aspects of his approach re...

I used to work with someone who was disgusted at those who Google themselves.  She felt it was unseemly and a waste of time.  I disagree. As a writer trying to build a platform, you’ve got to know if you’re making an impact.  In the days before, say, the 1980s, you sent your material to a print publisher and they did the work.  They advertised, distributed, and tried to make sure it would sell.  It is no longer so. Today a writer must promote their own material, even with big publishers.  You must make yourself known.  And so I Google myself.  And there is a kind of logic to it. I’ve published with six different journals.  To my limited imagination, that means six places have, on occasion, liked what I produce.  When I want to submit something for publication, I wonder which of the six might like it.  I also wonder which of the six will get viewed. Google tends to put the pages with the most hits at the top.  B...

I try to be patient, but, like Morpheus, I’m well aware that time is against us.   Since I write obsessively, manically, even, and each day reminds me I’m aging, I find waiting months for publishers to be very trying.   Time to take the red pill. Along with my daily efforts to produce new content, I’ve also been working at packaging.  That is to say, putting together a collection of stories to try to farm out to someone who understands me. There are publishers who still do short print runs of collections of short stories.  I own several such collections, and when a novel is too long for the time that I have, I turn to the short story to fill the space.  I’ve written several, and have had thirteen published.  There are many, many more that have offended publishers across the internet. Since the time of finding sympathetic editors seems to have passed, I’m thinking it might be time to put a collection together.  Problem is, I write in severa...

I recently ran across a copy of Library Journal .  Those of us who write are greatly indebted to libraries, even if we never sell a story. Much of my childhood involves memories of trips to the library.  The smells, the tacky texture of books constantly handled, the quiet.  They stay with me. While thumbing through the Library Journal , it struck me that I'd never heard of many of the publishers advertising there. I thought of how hard it's been to find publishers for my own work, and I realized it's a lot like the story of the perfect lovers. You know the one. The story where lovers that we, as readers, know belong together, but the author (cruel lot that we are) keep them apart.  Romeo and Juliet is only one such scenario. Publishers need content.  They crave writers who are steady, dependable producers of good material.  Some of us write every day and have done so for decades.  Publishers don't notice us. For our part, as wri...

With information available at lightning speed all around the world, publishing remains a very slow business.  One of the few jobs unavailable to computers or robots, the editor is a reading machine.  The editor is also a bottleneck. In many presses, once an editor accepts a book for publication, it will still need to go through the production process.  Even in this age of high technology, errors are waiting to creep in at every stage of transference, making proofreading necessary and slowing the process down. It is a lot less expensive to catch an error at the stage of a proof than it is after hundreds, or thousands of copies have been printed.  Even after the long wait for approval, it is an even longer wait until a book appears. Waiting is on my mind as I have my once accepted, frequently rejected novel under consideration with about six independent presses at the moment.  I used to be a believer in single submission only.  Life is too short ...

So, I sign into my gmail account yesterday to post my piece only to discover a rejection letter in my inbox.  When a journal called Down and Out rejects you, you know your work must suck. I’d be lying if I said I’d forgotten how many rejection notes I’ve received.  I actually do keep track.  (45 different journals, if anyone’s wondering.)  It’s a practice I recommend.  Not because it’s good to keep depression in your back pocket, but because it’s good to know who likes your work. For a long time only Danse Macabre seemed to find me worth publishing.  Jersey Devil Press took a couple of my stories, but a change of editor resulted in a stream of rejections.  Even Lovecraft had Weird Tales . Then suddenly five journals accepted pieces in quick succession.  Since then, nothing.  Feast and famine.  Love and hate.  Life and death. In this era of internet publications, finding an editor who “gets” you is the best yo...

I recently read a zombie novel.  That’s not entirely true.  I recently finished a zombie novel that I had been reading since last autumn.  Maybe late summer. Monster books have always been among my guilty pleasures.  The monstrous captures the imagination like no other topic, filling me with boyish thrills, frissons of possibilities unimagined.  I read vampire novels (drawing the line at Twilight) and werewolf books, when they can be found, are even better. Zombies, however, just don’t seem to work for me.   It’s not that I have anything against zombies.  My first piece of published fiction was a zombie story.  The problem isn’t the topic, but the suspension of reality.  Zombies are believable enough.  In my story the zombie identity isn’t revealed until the end.  There’s a reason for that. In a novel, where the story stretches on over many, many pages, your rational mind creeps in and thinks, this is impossib...

Have you ever gone to a used book store and found uncorrected proofs for sale?  Some store owners give them away.  In the same store you might find multiple copies of a book that had been a best seller, once upon a time.  It all has to do with how publishing works. Once a book has been accepted for publication, the publisher has to guess how many might sell.  Although this is an educated guess, it always involves a risk.  A friend in publishing told me that’s way it’s always important to point out a book that is similar to yours.  A unique book is high risk. For a while there, anything vampires would sell.  I think we might be seeing a kind of dawn rising on the vampire genre (now that I’ve written a vampire novel), but because of the—love it or hate it—success of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight saga, everyone wanted vampires.  They sucked in money. A traditional publisher will send your manuscript to a copy-editor and then a typesetter....

A writer I know—an actual, published one!—once said he’d never write a sex scene.  I can respect that.  Plenty of classics have, at best, innuendo.  Still, other texts, going back to the Bible and beyond have sex scenes. I read about writing.  Experts say that readers want stories that will help them cope with issues they face.  We all face sexual issues, whether we face them as asexuals, curious sexuals, or hyper-sexuals.  Many modern novels have sex scenes to make them more realistic.  Or lucrative. Although much of my writing is a kind of horror, the stories often involve sexual insecurities.  There are few other areas in life where we make ourselves so vulnerable.  A lot of people, I think, get hurt. There’s part of the dilemma of the sex scene right there.  It reveals an awful lot about the writer.  I grew up as an asexual.  I didn’t date until my junior year of college, if you can even call what I did then da...