Collected Thoughts

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 several different veins. Perhaps my stories all begin to sound the same after a while, but I write satire and literary fiction as well as gentle horror.

Trying to think how to describe my work to a potential publisher, I think something like: Edgar Allan Poe meeting Ray Bradbury for drinks at a bar run by H. P. Lovecraft. My work resembles none of theirs completely. All three are nevertheless present.

I strive for a mood of helplessness to circumstance in my stories. Forced into a genre corner, I would call them “Existential Gothic.” We live in a world we don’t really understand. Those of us born into humble circumstances just don’t know how to go about breaking into the hallowed halls of publication.

My characters tend to be paralyzed with fear. Some editors have suggested that I have them do something about it. The fact is, faced with the horrors of publication rejection, I simply don’t know what to do.

Uh-oh. It looks like I’ve become my own metaphor again.

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Maybe Okay

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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. ...

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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