K. Marvin Bruce

Being published because you’ve managed to string some words together and bought a publisher’s interest with your money doesn’t make you an author.   I once read that Donald Trump has written more books than any other president.   Really?   A functional illiterate is an author? We struggling writers know better.   Writing is a lifestyle, an outlook on life.   We carry around notebooks, slips of paper, or electronic devices that are crammed with thoughts and observations.   We spend quite time either scribbling or typing.   We create meaning. Books are a commodity.   There was shock in the publishing community when an Amazon spokesperson referred to books as simply another form of merchandise some years back.   Publishers blanched.   Books are so much more than paper and ink.   They are miniature universes, cheap.   Anyone can afford to be a god of a secondhand cosmos. Trump has been famous for many years and famous ...

Every year about this time I begin to panic.  The myth of perpetual growth suggests that each year should lead to more publications than the previous one, and by November it is clear that I’ve started to slip from my previous lofty goals.  I have reached a total of 18 published stories now, in a total of eight different venues.  Have I grown as a writer? September saw the panic start.  Some journals, particularly those run by college or university departments, only open for submissions with the start of the school year.  A family crisis the first week of September set my plans off kilter for a couple of months.  Now that I’ve regained my footing, it looks like I’ve fallen behind. Over the holiday weekend I was able to send out five of my multiply rejected stories for yet another sortie against the established publishers.  I’ve been working on building my Twitter following in the meantime, but my fiction writing has been suffering.  Every ...