Friday before Senior Year

The Space between Atoms will continue next week. (The episode is already written.) This week instead I wanted to pass along the timely and happy news that my story, “Friday before Senior Year,” has been published in The Corner Bar. You may read it here: http://cornerbarmagazine.com/pdfs/corner-bar-volume-05-issue-06.pdf.

This particular tale delves back into my own high school days. Those among us timid and shy wondered what other kids did on the weekend while we were curled up at home with books. And the monsters of this story were conjured by an article like that mentioned by the protagonist.

Many of us who write fiction draw from the well of our own experience. I knew bullies in school. Other guys in the locker room bragged of what they’d done with girls we’d only ever seen fully clad. They talked of secret and scary places. Some of them died.

The young might be classified as a different species. Those kids I knew in high school, at least those who found me on Facebook, have mostly sobered up into disenchanted adults. I write fiction to keep the wonder alive. The folks over at The Corner Bar get that.

As I was writing my seventh novel an idea came to me. One of the characters in “Friday before Senior Year” was actually the protagonist of the story I was composing. Writing often works like that. Separate characters thrown into the many episodes that fiction dreams up, come together in interesting ways. Writing is a kind of magic.

The monsters in my stories are sometimes not the evil ones. I have published twenty-two other stories and in many of them the monsters are the innocent ones. That means that those who are guilty are the others, and I suspect we all know who those are.

My high school was weird. I grew up in a small town where everyone knew that strange things happened from time to time. “Friday before Senior Year” is a celebration of one of those unexpected things.

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

Search This Blog