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. Quite often it deals with clashing worldviews. I think how Franz Kafka was later discovered, but, of course, the work had to be published to be found.

The great gatekeepers are deluged with submissions. What of those with a surfeit of imagination? Who see the poetry in the strange? But who maybe didn’t major in English so they have no connections?

Ironically, the internet has made it both easier and harder to get published. It’s easier to find places but harder to get in. Like that squirrel on my roof, I’m kept outside. The outside, of course is much larger than the inside.

“Creative Writing Club” won honorable mention in Typehouse Literary Magazine’s, 2d Biennial Short Fiction Contest in 2019, but they declined to publish it. I tried a few other places, but one would publish it only if I gutted it of a story-within-the-story that I wrote at about 16. That old story was the whole reason I wrote the damn thing.

At last it will see the light of day. The teacher who, in real life, ran our creative writing club suggested, back in the eighties, that it should be published. Things come full circle sometimes.

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...

Maybe Okay

A couple pieces of encouraging news, perhaps, dear struggling writers. I had a couple short stories accepted for publication in recent weeks. As a fellow writer recently said, “You've got to keep trying. Somebody will like what you wrote.” That’s a bit of sunshine. And it’s likely true. But the stories: “The Crossing,” about two men in a boat trying to cross the Atlantic, was accepted by JayHenge Publishing. JayHenge is a small, but paying publisher. I was flattered when they wanted it for their Masque & Maelström: The Reluctant Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe anthology. Being associated with Poe in any way feels good. The second story, “St. Spiders’ Day,” had been brewing in my mind for years—yes, this is a long game! A friend pointed me to The Creepy podcast. Since the story hadn’t been written, I followed their guidelines of what they wanted. It worked. I recently heard a successful wri...

K. Marvin Bruce

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