K. Marvin Bruce

Being a working writer means living with inherent contradictions.  For fifty weeks of the year daily life involves awaking between 3:00 and 3:30 a.m., writing for half an hour, and catching a bus to over eight hours of work in New York City.  Then riding the bus back home again in time for supper and bed.  I’m not complaining, just observing.  That’s what writers do. That lifestyle—constantly tired, anxious, and pressed for time to get the mundane chores done (paying bills, balancing the checkbook, taking out the recycling)—wears me down like a grindstone.  When the weekend comes I sleep an extra half hour or so and, although refreshed, I awake without the urgency that frames five days a week.  It’s a crisis. Every year I save up enough vacation days to take off between Christmas and New Year’s.  As a former professor this is a no-brainer.  In my industry (publishing) there’s no such thing as an emergency.  Nobody dies if a book is released a week later than scheduled.  Even s

The ghost story, as we know it, was originally associated more with Christmas than Halloween.  That makes sense, since the solstice is darker than the equinox.  Both days stand as transitions—Halloween is the beginning of the darkness, and Christmas is midnight. If you’re like me you may have comfy memories of childhood holidays.  That snug and warm feeling of being at home, well-stocked with food against the cold outside.  The hope of presents and a day of not worrying about the realities outside. Nightmares, however, know no holidays.  I awake in the dark and the light is but a mere sliver of the day.  Long before dinnertime the sun has set again.  Breakfast and supper are in the dark.  Is it any wonder the ghosts linger around the Christmas tree? My first published story, now on a defunct website, was the 2009 winner of the prix d’écriture de Noël in Fiction in Danse Macabre .  A scary Christmas story?  This was what gave me the courage to continue to try publication. 

It’s always something.  At the beginning of November it was depression over the results of the election.  Creatives everywhere mourned.  Then I had to be out of town.  Then last weekend I had to put the plastic over the windows.  Weekends are endangered species. The first casualty of this loss of time is my creative writing.  I tend to spend my weekends trying feverishly to catch up with the ideas that have flitted through my head all week long.  The mesh on my mental butterfly-net is too loose, however, and they tend to get away. Saturday comes and goes.  Sunday quickly follows.  Monday I’m back in the office wondering how a human being can put up with such pressure of unexpressed ideas.  I carry a little notebook in my pocket everyday and am so busy on weekends that I don’t even open it. I’m not complaining here.  I’m also sure that I’m far from unique when it comes to working writers who spend their days commuting, working, and generally trying to make a living.  These

Every year about this time I begin to panic.  The myth of perpetual growth suggests that each year should lead to more publications than the previous one, and by November it is clear that I’ve started to slip from my previous lofty goals.  I have reached a total of 18 published stories now, in a total of eight different venues.  Have I grown as a writer? September saw the panic start.  Some journals, particularly those run by college or university departments, only open for submissions with the start of the school year.  A family crisis the first week of September set my plans off kilter for a couple of months.  Now that I’ve regained my footing, it looks like I’ve fallen behind. Over the holiday weekend I was able to send out five of my multiply rejected stories for yet another sortie against the established publishers.  I’ve been working on building my Twitter following in the meantime, but my fiction writing has been suffering.  Every now and again I need a bit of good news

I don't know about you, but Daylight Savings Time always messes me up.  I set clocks ahead, or back, and end up being dazed and confused for days afterward.  This is distressing because my writing is based on a regular schedule. Writers often rely on routine.  I awake early, so you might think an extra hour's sleep would be welcome.  Instead, I awake in the middle of the night, confused as to what time it really is.  My bedside clock and my phone disagree.  Who's right? Who's write?  My routine is to stumble out of bed into my writing chair.  I try to scrawl down my thoughts before the day interferes.  Days always interfere. On Daylight Savings morning, I'm already confused when I awake.  I sit down to write and find myself growing sleepy.  The day stretches on and on, but I'm not inspired.  I'm just tired. Writing is my routine.  Like an infant, I suffer without it.  Regular hours, or even just regular minutes, will keep me honest.  I rely on th

I remember reading an interview with Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son.  It was when I was reading his perfectly titled Heart-Shaped Box .  In the interview he mentioned the kinds of things he thinks about when out and about in the world.  His macabre thoughts are similar to mine. Joe Hill, however, is a bestselling author.  His father is one of the most successful writers currently alive.  Even though Stephen King writes other than horror occasionally, now that October’s nearly over his classic works come to mind. As does the dilemma of the unknown writer.  My parents don’t write.  One of them is deceased, so that is probably a good thing, but neither one of them was educated and writing is not something either enjoys/ed.  Nobody could tell me how to get published. I started writing at a young age.  I attempted my first novel in middle school.  It was also the first manuscript I ever tore up.  I’ve had eighteen short stories published, mostly in online form on websites few hav

I have a problem with writing.  Actually, I have a problem with sleeping that leads to a problem with writing. I’m a morning person.  My circadian rhythms are chirping away at about 3 a.m.  I’m usually up and writing by 3:30 because I commute and I don’t live too close to the city.  This has become my habit.  I’m sleepy most of the time so I try to “sleep in” on weekends.  I’m up before 5 anyway. The problem is when I sleep in my mind is less sharp.  I get out of bed less tired, but less inspired.  I spend so much of the rest of the week weary that I look forward to that couple extra hours of slumber only to discover that the days I don’t have to commute I can’t write well.  What to do? I know that writers, historically, have kept idiosyncratic hours.  Staying up nights drinking, and such.  In today’s culture of running in place just to pay the rent, that’s not really an option.  Other people at work wonder why I don’t stay late.  Getting your work done is never enough.

I have a problem with writing.  Actually, I have a problem with sleeping that leads to a problem with writing. I’m a morning person.  My circadian rhythms are chirping away at about 3 a.m.  I’m usually up and writing by 3:30 because I commute and I don’t live too close to the city.  This has become my habit.  I’m sleepy most of the time so I try to “sleep in” on weekends.  I’m up before 5 anyway. The problem is when I sleep in my mind is less sharp.  I get out of bed less tired, but less inspired.  I spend so much of the rest of the week weary that I look forward to that couple extra hours of slumber only to discover that the days I don’t have to commute I can’t write well.  What to do? I know that writers, historically, have kept idiosyncratic hours.  Staying up nights drinking, and such.  In today’s culture of running in place just to pay the rent, that’s not really an option.  Other people at work wonder why I don’t stay late.  Getting your work done is never enough.

Advice from writers to writers is cheap.  I try not to give advice beyond “there’s no right or wrong way to write,” but still I’m influenced by others who say how to write.  After all, you have to please others, no? I’ve been told you have to write short to write long.  The idea being that if your short pieces get noticed then you’ll be in a position to say more.  (I.e., write short stories before trying a novel.)  Then I asked a New York Times bestselling author.  He said, “If I had done that, I’d have never gotten published.” Another chestnut we’re freely given is that we shouldn’t make our readers work to understand us.  Pander to the reader.  This past week I started to read a novel, again a New York Times bestseller, and some thirty pages in I still have no idea what’s going on.  Now, I do hold a doctorate in the humanities so I think I know how to read.  Somebody’s bucking the advice and making plenty of bucks at it. A book editor, on a publishing website, says nev

The other day I asked a friend to define “gothic.”  Heavy, dark, supernatural—these were a few of the words suggested.  When autumn comes my thoughts turn gothic, and I’m always looking for good gothic things to read. I have blogged in the past about how reading literature that isn’t great is good.  I’m serious about that.  You can learn a lot by reading poor writing.  Some gothic literature is more the former than the latter.  Like Dark Shadows novels. Dark Shadows was running on daytime television when I was a child.  As a teen I began to read the novelizations, by Marilyn Ross, whenever I could find them.  Belles lettres they’re not.  Gothic, most decidedly so.  That’s why I keep coming back to them.  They aren’t scary.  In fact, they’re formulaic and predictable.  But so, so gothic. Spooky mansions, the Maine woods, forlorn vampire, faded wealth.  Even, yes, dark shadows.  The stories create a mood I find difficult to locate elsewhere. Inspired by the most r

I’m pleased to announce my latest piece has appeared in Corvus Review 6; you can read it here: http://nebula.wsimg.com/47de969e212ebf15837556bcc515fc67?AccessKeyId=3C22B84D674D5BA7A77D&disposition=0&alloworigin=1 As usual when I have a story published, I give a few hints as to what was going through my mind here.  “Last Train from New York,” in addition to being one of my most rejected stories, is also one of my favorites.  It’s personal. While I’ve never been on a haunted train, knowingly, the story came to me through a confluence of unfortunate events.  I lost a job quite unexpectedly—my first job in New York City.  The story is primarily about how it feels to lose a job.  This particular trauma was my third professional job lost because of circumstances. Yep, that’s blood. The story also has roots in reality.  Once, on a New Jersey Transit train, my family jumped on board the first car.  We were on our way to the airport and didn’t want to haul our luggage

I’ve got a bandage on my thumb.  It’s because of my overweening love of books.  To write well one must read even better.  Then the book stacks begin to grow. I head to the basement.  I used to live in a four-bedroom house, but it was owned by the institution that intimated my services were no longer required.  After that I’ve moved to a succession of two-bedroom apartments and all that implies. In the basement lie my dormant power tools and scraps of wood.  Back when we lived in “the house” my basement buzzed with the making of cheap, pine furniture.  Mostly bookshelves.  Here in the apartment the basement is shared and space is at a premium.  Some people don’t like finding sawdust all over their stuff. The result has been stacks of books growing up beside the existing shelves.  I don’t mind that so much, since a background of books is always visually interesting.  But then I went to get a book from the bottom of a stack and ended up with a ton of knowledge cascading

Creativity, as we who write know, begets creativity.  I was reminded of this by having lunch with another writer in New York City.  I use “writer” intentionally since major publishers have studiously avoided both of us, but we carry on, nonetheless. New York has no dearth of writers’ groups and workshops and seminars.  They work best for those who live in the city (unlike yours truly) and who have some spare cash (also unlike yours truly).  Still, meeting with other creatives is what makes our work work. Like the vast majority of writers, I work for a living.  My job, with the added commute, takes up about 90 percent of every waking hour of the work week.  My time for writing adds up to less than five hours per Monday-through-Friday, a pretty sad statistic.  Meeting with other writers has even less than that. Using a nom de plume , I suppose, doesn’t help.  Some of my writer colleagues know who K. Marvin Bruce is, but most do not.  I’m not sure if my recent lunch engagemen

Writing is a lonely activity.  The end goal is often community, though.  You exchange the loneliness for a book deal and lots of people read your work.  In theory.  For those who don’t get published, is the loneliness for nothing? To me, writing is its own reward.  It is a crying shame that other people won’t read it, but it is my personal cry against being forgotten.  I don’t hang out with friends, so read my writing. The world’s a busy place with work demanding it’s 99 percent of flesh and little time is left besides to do what one wants.  Weekends are for errands.  Or friends.  Or writing. Writing for me is all about generating friends.  I’m a nice guy—you’ll have to take my word for that, but it’s true—but I’m also shy.  I watch other people.  I write about what I see.  What I imagine happens among friends. The results may not be sparkly, but I notice the grit on the sidewalk shines too.  I’ve always told my writing partner Elizabeth that there’s no right way to wr

The best advice writers give aspiring writers is this: read.  Read a lot.  The thing about our species is that we learn by watching what others do.  To write is to read. Thing is, I’m an eclectic reader.  And my writing, like a snowball, grows from contact with other words.  I read literary fiction, I write literary fiction.  I read horror, I write horror.  I read humor, I write humor.  My promiscuous reading leads to the sin of eclectic writing. How do I know it’s a sin?  The editors tell me so.  The great priestly gatekeepers who hold the means of recognition in their genre-stained hands.  Nobody knows what to make of the cross-genre man.  The transgender are fine.  Encouraged even.  But beware the cross-genre man. As I go sinning across the internet, reading a little of this and a little of that, the snowman I’m building starts to look maybe a bit like that of Pig Pen.  Did I mention I read children’s books too? When Gene Roddenberry set a western in outer spa

What makes a story scary?  I suspect that the answer depends on the asker.  You see, I think of my stories as scary.  Whether other people do, I don’t know. When I look for a scary story I’m not looking for gore.  Properly speaking, I’m not looking for fear either.  Mood, creepiness, and the strange are far more appealing.  Frisson at the atmosphere.  Poe, I suspect, isn’t too scary these days.  He knew how to set a mood, though. I recently read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”  I’ve heard a lot about this story and since it is still under copyright I had to find a book that contained it.  It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Don’t take me wrong—I am a fan of Shirley Jackson.  She was able to deliver as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle show.  “The Lottery,” however, didn’t scare me.  It was interesting, a nice short story, but not fearful. I find my hackles rising when a story intimates a young person is in danger.  Particular

Ten percent, in the context of the Bible, is a tithe.  The old laws say that you owe God ten percent of your income.  Some religious people today still pay it. I was reading an article recently that featured another ten percent.  This applied to writers.  Although an unscientific survey—including information from Duotrope—this article suggested the acceptance rate of fiction writers is ten percent. That means, and I’m no math guy, that a piece has to be submitted an average of ten times before it is accepted somewhere.  This helps explain, but not assuage, my lack of success when it comes to getting published.  It’s normal. This has been on my mind lately since  Interview with the Gorgon  is getting more than ripe.  I stopped trying to find publishers some five years ago when it was under contract with Vagabondage Press.  They took a long time killing it—with no kill fee—leaving me in a scramble to find another publisher. I’ve contacted lots of agents, but agents are o

How many novels must one man write, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, before you can call him an author?  I’ve completed six, none published, and I’ve got another well under way.  My business card, however, nowhere indicates that I’m an author. Being a writer is more than an occupation.  It’s an identity.  Like the vast majority of writers, I work for a living.  Long hours.  Long commute.  Heavy eyelids.  Sloped shoulders.  Weary sighs.  My boss thinks of me as an employee.  I think of myself as a writer gathering information. For me, there’s an ethics about it all.  I spend a lot of time reading.  Years, if I add up all the hours.  Am I not morally required to give something back?  I’ve written, sweated over, edited, and polished my novels.  Yet they sit on my hard drive seen by my eyes only and the even harder eyes of alabaster editors. Such is a writer’s life.  I’m not really looking for the big time.  I’d like to send my fiction out there for the (I hope) hundreds, or may

“The Last Train from New York” is a story I wrote while working for a New York publisher.  Being unemployed was on my mind, and the story is a metaphor for a loser trying to find his place.  This past week I heard the glad news that “The Last Train from New York” has been accepted for publication in Corvus Review .  This makes eighteen stories published, and also marks another literary magazine that seems to think I’m capable. That may sound gratuitous on my part, but I assure you it's not.  Like many writers I suffer from lack of self-esteem.  All the advice givers say to take rejection lightly, but as someone who puts a lot of effort into each piece I decide to send out, how can I not take rejection personally?  When I do get a hit, it makes my day.  Week, even. Only a writer understands how publication is validation.  Someone who has a louder voice than me—a longer reach—says yes, this guy has something interesting to say.  Part of the problem is my stories are ofte

Keeping to a schedule, I’ve always found, helps me to remain steady in my writing.  A creature of the early morning, I awake when the majority in my time zone slumber, and try to capture my thoughts with this net call literacy.  I try to do it daily, but the desire to sleep is great, and weekends invariably find me cheating. Then there’s travel.  Even fictional people need vacation.  Indeed, travel is one of the greatest sources of literary inspiration.  Seeing something out of the ordinary, talking to people you seldom see, throwing your concept of morning and night off by several hours.  These things can be an alternate form of consciousness. I try to blog on schedule.  This, as most of my literary endeavors, is subject to a kind of profound failure at times.  Life gets in the way—wonderfully in the way—of writing.  It is always my hope, though, that at the end of it all, I’ll be able to scribble it all down. My current trip was beset by bad weather, excessive earl

Unless you’re sexy, or already well-connected, the internet feels like high school all over again.  You want to be noticed, but you’re insecure, a bit shy, and lacking self-confidence.  You try putting yourself out there only to be rejected, and you crawl back into your book, where you feel safe. You’d think that the trauma, after all these years, might diminish a little.  Maybe it does for some people.  My career has turned into a train wreck and my efforts as a fiction writer haven’t exactly been welcomed with open arms.  But, I understand, one must build a platform. I have another life on the internet.  One where I don’t use a pen name.  In that internet world, where I’ve actually published two non-fiction books, nobody pays me much mind.  I’ve got a blog, a Twitter account, and a Goodreads account.  I tried to grow my Twitter following, and it has been very slow going. As K. Marvin Bruce, I also have this blog and a Twitter account.  If my novels ever get publish

In a recent conversation my friend Steve mentioned a disturbing editorial board meeting.  I’ve mentioned Steve before—he’s an editor at an academic press in New York.  What made this meeting disturbing, he said, was that editors had already decided what a writer’s style was, based on a previous book. Writing style, in my experience, is fluid.  I have written non-fiction books that are, frankly, boring.  That’s what I’d learned the academic presses wanted.  As a writer, however, I can produce pieces of a totally different style.  Who’s to say what kind of writer I am? This disturbs me because editors are the fundamental gatekeepers of the publishing industry.  And they don’t understand writing.  There was a time when editors were writers.  Now they’re business men and women.  I wonder how many of them read for pleasure. Type-casting used to be something actors feared.  I fear it too, I guess, as a writer.  If I write something funny can I ever be taken as a writer who

I’m in that post-euphoria period of receiving the latest round of rejection letters.  As I’ve mentioned before, I go for months without submitting stories for consideration because, unlike all the wisdom promulgated on the web, I have thin skin.  Rejection hurts.  I have to be particularly confident to submit anything. I know I’m not alone in this.  I know that rejections are often impersonal because huge numbers of submissions are received and K. Marvin Bruce is just another face in a vast, vast crowd.  His writing is weird, if literate (hopefully) and his stories aren’t about what they seem to be about.  It’s nothing personal. Thinking about the past can be dangerous.  Writing in “the good old days” seemed to be quite different.  In the first place, it was hand-written.  In the second place, there were far fewer places to publish.  In the third place, if an editor liked your stuff, you’d made a publishing colleague, not just a glancing acquaintance. As I’ve mentioned bef

I don’t often get the chance to write two posts on one weekend, but a combination of circumstances have made it possible today.  First, it’s a holiday weekend.  Second, I had two stories published the same day (July 1) and I like to give the links as soon as I can. The second story, published under the title “Prom Night,” appeared in Exterminating Angel Press: The Magazine ( here ).  The original title was “The Death of Oil City,” and the story was written (or overwritten) about five years ago.  Many journals turned it down. This is, in many ways, a biographical story.  I don’t often try to write a first-person narrative as a female.  I know many editors who say men can’t, and shouldn’t, do such things.  The protagonist for this story, however, had to be female since, in this situation, so much had to be lost. It’s my celebration, or mourning, for a small town.  Oil City, Pennsylvania actually exists.  I went to high school there.  When I came back from college, however,

My my recent story published, “As Nature Directs,” (it can be read here ) just appeared in The Fable Online .  This was a story inspired by Poe and, as I mentioned to the editors, was primarily about setting the tone. It’s a creepy story that originally had somewhat religious undertones.  The source of the tension is that the protagonist doesn’t know who he really is.  Do any of us know who we really are? Riding a horse, I told my writing partner Elizabeth, always reminds me of Poe.  I have to admit a couple things here: I haven’t ridden a horse since I was in college (I was a summer counselor at horse camp), and the reason I associate horses with Poe is the opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher.”   “The Fall of the House of Usher” is my favorite short story.  It was firmly in mind when I wrote “As Nature Directs.”  There’s nothing inherently supernatural about the tale.  It’s suggested, but not explicit. The wonders of nature can be frightening.  I terrif

There are weeks, as a writer, many weeks in fact, when I don’t submit anything for publication.  I have a backlog of stories, and even of novels, but putting yourself out for possible rejection never comes easily.  On the uplift from an acceptance, my ebullience leads me to submit others. This has been a week of Yes and No.  I was pleased to hear on Wednesday that The Fable Online has accepted my story, “As Nature Directs,” for publication.  The acceptance note kept me happy, even through work. Thursday Liminal Stories turned down my effort entitled “Fire Everlasting.”  The editors said that the writing was good but the fit was not.  That’s something I can understand.  I really should be better about matching content and container.  It’s a growth area. Having editors say the writing is good always provides a boost.  It was one of the readers’ comments on “As Nature Directs” that stayed with me.  The reader noted that the story was creepy, and, I quote “Poe-like.”  I bare

A criticism that I’ve occasionally received concerns pacing.  The short story, which today means up to about 7000 words, is a limited amount of space to establish mood.  My writing partner Elizabeth was reading a Poe short story recently and commented on how long it seemed. We’ve been accustomed, by the internet, to shorten things.  Flash fiction is in.  Say it in 1000 words or less.  What’s the correct pacing for a 300-word story? I’ve been editing a number of my complete, but unpublished, stories lately.  I’m trying to bring the word counts down.  I don’t want to be thought of as a plodding writer.  At the same time, I’m no action writer.  My stories are thoughtful. Some time ago I started reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire .  Dark, moody, and sensuous, this is a slow-paced novel.  Focusing on subtleties and emotions, she paints a writerly picture of the inner life of the undead. If I were an editor today I’d say she has pacing issues.  More neck biting a