K. Marvin Bruce

The search for an agent is entering its fourth month and I often wonder just what classics we’d have to live without if Herman Melville or Charlotte Bronte had received email after email saying “it just doesn’t have that ‘have to have’ feeling.”   We’d be literary beggars. The true irony of this is I know people who work in the publishing industry.   They say that someone with my background should be a no-brainer for an agent.   When I was a young man a friend accused me of writing too much like Melville.   “Nobody writes like that anymore,” he said.   His father-in-law was a writer. Melville was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne.   Their works are endlessly remade in a more modern idiom.   Electrum may look like gold, but it’s not the same.   Why not search for the real thing? People learn how to do things from watching the masters.   While it may have been the glib Doc Savage and Dark Shadows pulps that led me to reading, I soon...

This is the feeling that keeps me writing.   The email that accepts a story for publication. Although it might not seem like it, I’ve been writing fiction since about 1974.   Those first stories, scrawled on a school tablet, were my way of coping.   After my mother’s remarriage, a move, and a verbally abusive step-father came into the picture, I began writing. My first published stories (which I don’t count) were in my high school newspaper.   I won a state-wide essay contest.   I’d been bitten by the bug.   For reasons I can’t go into here, I stopped submitting fiction until about 2006. Now I’m trying to catch up.   Literary magazines have a backlog.   So do I.   A story I’d tried to publish a couple of times, “Friday before Senior Year,” has just been accepted by The Corner Bar .   I’m thrilled and pleased. You see, I’ve been working on a continuation of that story.   Not the main character, but a secondary charac...

I have another blog.   That one, under my real name, has fewer readers than this one.   Unlike the piece you’re reading at the moment, this is an occasional note.  I post on the other blog daily.   Interestingly I’ve had publishing professionals tell me that’s what they like to see.  Funny. Perhaps it doesn’t seem like much, but coming up with discrete, intelligent (I hope!) things to say every day, for over a decade, should demonstrate willingness to work hard.   When I started the other blog I had lots of followers.   Now I have few. I know, I know!   If I were in your place I’d be saying, “Maybe your writing sucks.”   Maybe it does.   Maybe it doesn’t.   The point is without someone willing to help we all spin in obscurity. Someone I know online recently published a book on a topic in which I also publish.   He has tons of followers.   I don’t.   He also has a university post and thus an institut...

I get the feeling not many people are truly haunted.   I know I am.   The reason I get this feeling is that my fiction, which clearly reveals evidence of haunting, is always a hard sell.   I can’t give it away, at times. You see, some of us are haunted by life.   I recently read a biography of one of my childhood heroes, Rod Serling.   The biographer said he wasn’t a haunted man, he just played one on TV.   Not that I want anyone else to be haunted, but I felt a little let down by that assessment. Is there something wrong with admitting being haunted?   Like the stigma of mental illness?   Why are people so afraid of those who are haunted?   I’ve always felt drawn to them.   You’d think the internet might be where we could find one another. Yet I had behind a pseudonym.   Why?   I’m afraid.   I’m afraid to lose my “real job” that I don’t enjoy.   Afraid that my family will find out what’s i...