Last Train from New York

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 along to the upstairs or downstairs seating area.

While sitting here, right behind the conductor’s cabin, the panel to the electric room kept creeping open and slamming shut. It sounded like a haunted house door, and we could stare inside at the guts of the machine. It was eerie on quite a few levels. This continued the entire trip.

The ticket-taker kept coming up between stops to talk to the driver. We could see only the driver’s feet and hands. The main elements of the story, if you’ve read it, suggested themselves. All they required was some fictionalization and the blending in of the worthlessness a worker feels at being let go from a job after a positive review.

I still work in New York. I’m very circumspect about my job. But I now take a bus to work. Just in case.

Comments

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...

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. ...

Creativity

Maybe you’ve noticed this too. When you step away from fiction writing for a while, your creativity becomes flaccid. I’ve had to step away from this blog for a while because I was writing my sixth nonfiction book. God, I’ve missed fiction! Now that I’ve entered that phase of waiting for publishers to respond, I’ve turned my limited writing time back to fiction. I submitted a couple of stories this week and am waiting to hear about those as well. When you’re a writer, waiting is a way of life. Opening my software where I store my fiction stories, I was amazed by how many I found. Some of them are bad—so bad that they’ll never (rightfully) be published. Some are surprisingly good and have been sitting around while I finished up my nonfic. The vast majority, however, are unfinished. Some years back I realized that when I’m writing in the heat of inspiration but don’t have time to finish a story that I need to write down where I...

K. Marvin Bruce

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