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.

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...

K. Marvin Bruce

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