One of Those Years

Did you ever have one of those years? You know the kind I mean. The kind of year when your best laid publication plans get shunted aside by the specter of life itself.

Many months ago I began posting a novel I've written here (The Space between Atoms). The idea was simple enough—it gave me a regular source of material for weekly posts on this blog, and it might provide a chance for a reader or two to be drawn into the story. One of the characters actually appears in my published story, "Friday before Senior Year."

The disc drive that holds all my files has gone bad and although it happened months ago, I haven't had the time to send it to a disc repair place. Many files were lost and I simply haven't had time to recover them. How do you find time for publishing in such a situation?

In December of 2020 I prepared eleven stories for publication. I only sent out two and they've both been rejected already. I haven't had time to send them back out again. I don't struggle to write; I struggle to publish.

Ironically, I read quite a lot of fiction that isn't that great. My guess is that the writers don't have failed disc drives. Perhaps they trust the cloud more than I do. Maybe they have connections.

Thankfully, among the files that live on my regular hard drive are the current stories that haven't been published. (All the published ones now reside on a defective disc.) Life is full of bottlenecks like this—time when time prevents the effective use of time.

Morpheus famously said, "Time is always against us." As we make our way in this Matrix world you just have to wonder what the sentient programs have in mind. I'm sure they haven't backed up onto a single external hard drive.

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Working Through It

The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time. Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot. Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group. Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday. I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare. I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run. And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined. One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful. They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only. Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away. They also met on Saturdays. Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...

Patterns

There’s a pattern I’m noticing. For fiction publishers. Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle. Part of the reason is the pattern. Lots of websites list publishers. The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in. That’s the kiss of death. Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested. I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns. This too is a pattern. Back to the smaller presses. I check many lists. What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic. It’s literary but it’s weird. Publishers don’t know what to do with it. If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it. The pattern includes writers who never get discovered. Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my wor...

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. ...

K. Marvin Bruce

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