K. Marvin Bruce

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 t...

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 Twi...

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’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...

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 ther...

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 ...