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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Dusty

My, this thing is dusty. My fans—hi, Mom!—perhaps believe me to have perished in the pandemic. No, it was nonfiction’s fault. Since the pandemic began I’ve had two nonfiction books published and have written a third. With a nine-to-five job something’s got to give. Unfortunately it’s been fiction. Well, the groundhog didn’t see his shadow yesterday, so it must be safe to come out. I shuffled away the rejection notes and began submitting again. I’ve got a backlog of weird stories and maybe some new publishers have emerged? The thing is, don’t you just hate it when you’re in the mood to submit and some lit journal has its window for submissions firmly shut? My last story, “ The Hput, ” was published about three years ago. Oh, I’ve submitted since then, but with no traction. Well, it is winter. I’ve got a lot of stories lined up. I’ve been sending them out again, dreaming of making a dime at what I love doing best. When you’ve been writing for half a century, you l

Too Much Writing?

Has this ever happened to you? Have you written a story that you’ve completely forgot? Not only completely forgotten, but made unfindable? I play games with my stories and sometimes the joke’s on me. Okay, I suffer from graphomania. I write constantly. I do try to keep organized—I use a spreadsheet that has all my submissions on it. It has rejection/acceptance dates (mostly rejection). Lots of information. I decided to list on it every story, whether finished or in process. There are far too many (mostly in process). When I finish a story I often submit it. If I get burned, I’m shy about resubmitting. I often rewrite at this stage. Then, when I feel brave enough, I try again. The spreadsheet is color-coded. There, in the color that indicates finished and ready to submit is a story cryptically titled “The Password.” I don’t remember this story. I can’t recall what it was about or why I thought it was ready to publish. Looking through my electronic files,

Neglectful Parents

If I was a parent I’d be accused of neglect. I have to say 2017 was the least published year of recent memory. Not that I’ve been neglecting my fiction, but I had a non-fiction book accepted and I work full-time and commute to that job—you get the picture. I’ve also had a personal epiphany. If you can write, you should get paid for it. I know a publicist (not my own; I don’t have one) and she says she won’t let her authors even write an op-ed if they don’t get paid. I guess I’d never get published then. My Medusa novel had a flicker of hope for a few moments. A publisher actually wrote back asking for the rest of the manuscript. That’s never happened before. Then the editor disappeared. Even called me by the wrong pseudonym. I’ve gotta wonder about that because the second half of the novel’s even better than the first. While looking for an agent for my non-fiction (couldn’t find one of those either) I came across several who said they liked quirky ficti

K. Marvin Bruce

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