K. Marvin Bruce

  Maybe it happens to you too, struggling writers.   Just when you get on a roll for fiction, nonfiction comes knocking.   In the past few months I’ve been invited to contribute to three non-fiction books and I’ve secured a nonfiction book contract.   I was just getting back into fiction. Last year I had four stories accepted for publication.   The last one came out just this past week.   “Christmas Wish” is a funny werewolf story.   You can find it in Calliope 174 (Winter 2021/22).   If you don’t read Calliope you should.   They’ve got lots of worthwhile stuff there. What’s so fun about a werewolf, did I hear you ask?   Well, if you try to make one your pet you’ll find out. The Christmas theme actually came from a story challenge I saw.   They were looking for Christmas stories and this one was set around that time of year.   Add a few words making it explicit and then you have a story. Given the time of year, the story is s...

  Persistence.   Although 27 doesn’t exactly equate to a tonne, it is a respectable number of stories to have published.   In addition to The Space between Atoms this week—it’ll be up soon!—I have had another acceptance to celebrate. “Christmas Wish” has been accepted by Calliope , one of my favorite places to publish.   They seem to get my offbeat sense of humor.   This story came to me out of the blue and I wrote it very quickly. I then sent it to a zine that didn’t have the courtesy even to reply.   I then saw a themed issue for a horror zine that looked promising.   They were doing a holiday issue and all I had to do was shift the tale from summer to winter, and presto!   It was a Christmas story. The themed magazine liked it, but they said it had too much humor in it.   That sometimes happens when I write horror.   (Not always, as is implied by “sometimes”.)   This one was guilty as charged.   It is a fun story, I hope. M...

One becomes inured.  That is to say, rejection letters are far more common than acceptances.  So it became clear to me while looking at my Submittable page recently.  The number of cheery blue acceptances is largely outweighed by those dreary gray “declined”s. Look, I’m an editor.  I know how this game works.  Every day I see the pitches the hopeful send, wanting to be represented by my press.  Every day I try to think how to write rejection letters that are complementary, comforting, encouraging.  The point is, I see bad writing. Some people see dead people.  Others of us see dead writing.  Books that should never have been born.  When you agonize over every word, and when you know that you’ve got some felicity with the pen (or on the keyboard) being classed with those who clearly don’t understand is painful. Awfully gloomy for a positive post, I must say!  I just received the good news that my story, “Glass-Wall...

Thanksgiving seems to be an appropriate time to express my gratitude to the editors of Calliope .  Apart from being (to date) the only literary magazine to actually print one of my stories (others, I am grateful, post them online), the editors have nominated “Initiating an Apocalypse” for a Pushcart Prize. I’m enough of a realist to know that my chances of actually winning a prize are slim, but it is nice when a story previously rejected many times is seen to have some potential.  I suspect, but I may be wrong, that writers don’t submit material unless they believe it is good enough to publish. Still, being declined repeatedly wears not only on the ego, but on the soul itself.  It’s easy to feel like a poser or mountebank trying to pass yourself off as a writer.  Still, somewhere deep down, we believe. At times I seriously question whether I should keep at this at all.  The ideas, however, burst out regardless.  Either I will catch them or they...

A rare day off work.  What to do?   I have been writing fiction since I was in middle school.  There was a hiatus of maybe a decade and a half during which I was learning “higher education” ways of expressing myself.  But the call to fiction was too strong to ignore. One of the most influential people in my life was a teacher whom I never had in class.  He was the faculty advisor to the creative writing club.  In high school he urged me to try to publish my work, but publication was too scary a step, and I didn’t know how.  Fact is, I still don’t.  Only now I’m old enough that that doesn’t stop me. Mr. Milliken said that the key to writing was constancy.  Write at least fifteen minutes a day.  In some form or other, I’ve been doing that for decades.  I realized on my day off that I had dozens of stories half-finished, some of which I couldn’t remember writing.  I also had dozens finished that I have never tried to ...

The giddying heights, the abysmal lows.  Being published, being rejected.  Opposites make excellent fodder for stories. I was cheered by the arrival of Calliope 144, Summer 2014.  My story, “Initiating an Apocalypse,” won third place in the contest for this issue, and, among other things, represents the first time my fiction has actually appeared in print form.  Heights! The story is, as the editor instantly recognized, satire.  The plot revolves around a professor who lost his job and who wants the world to share his misery.  Having studied ancient religions (the protagonist is based on a friend of mine) our hero calls on the ancient gods to help exact his revenge. In the background here is Zoroastrianism, perhaps the oldest continually practiced religion in the world.  The great god of the Zoroastrians was Ahura Mazda.  Since the world appeared to be governed by opposites, he had a foe who was totally evil: Angra Mainyu.  Zara...

A writer’s life is one of introspection and self-doubt.  There’s nothing like the ratio of rejection slips to acceptance emails to drive home the message that somehow your words are defective, your thoughts substandard, your ideas puerile.  Then a miracles happens.  A small miracle. It was a bleary-eyed Monday morning.  I hadn’t even bothered checking my email for a few days, sometimes trembling at the very thought.  Some days there’s only so much criticism I can take.  But this was something good. On a whim I entered a story in Calliope ’s annual writing contest.  This story had been rejected a total of seven times, but I believed in it.  Calliope is associated with Mensa, and I had an intelligent subtext to the tale—my stories are never about what they seem to be.  I sent it in and tried to forget it. The forgetting part worked, for the most part.  Daily life attempts to drown my writing hour from time to time.  Most...