K. Marvin Bruce

  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...

  My second completed novel—never published, of course—is one I still think is pretty good.   A little long, I admit, but well written.   It actually had three readers who agreed with both points: too long but well written.   One of them said I needed a good editor. I’ve read many overly long books.   Just this year alone I’ve read four novels that reached, nearly reached, or went over 500 pages.   One of the standard chestnuts of writing advice is “write short to write long.”   That only applies to some of us. Life has been so busy lately that I haven’t even been able to send in my damaged disc drive with The Space between Atoms on it, let alone try to get some of my completed stories published.   Some of it has to do with Covid-19, which, I think we’re all glad to see, seems to be releasing its grip on the United States. I submitted a book of short stories to a contest with Press 53 late last year.   It didn’t even win honorable mention, a...

Publishers, in a time of plague and pandemic, have a difficult time.   People aren’t really interested in much else beyond the crisis of the moment.   Sometimes I wonder if it’s bad form to seek publication at a time such as this. Fiction, I remind myself, is truer than fact.   And it’s a great release from the daily stresses of living amid COVID-19.   A friend of mine who’s an editor told me that novels are selling well.   Nonfiction not so much. For the last several weeks I’ve heard nothing from the agents I queried all the way back in January.   Many of them are in New York City, the epicenter, it always seems, of American drama.   So many people living so close together.   How could they be thinking about fiction? It’s the future.   Fiction, that is.   Those of us who indulge in speculative fiction know that it is a coping mechanism.   It teaches us how to handle “what if…?”   The coronavirus is a big “what if…...