K. Marvin Bruce

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...

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...

From the earliest days writers have invented words.  Two of the masters in this art were Shakespeare and Dr. Seuss.  I should, of course, add Lewis Carroll.  Those who live by the word, die by the word.  It seems only fair that they should help create their own means of execution. My writing partner Fantasia and I like to discuss words we’ve invented.  I pepper them into my stories, and since publishers tend to eschew truly creative works, most of the heat is felt by me alone.  It’s truly sad, because, in the most modest way possible, I like to think that some of those words add flavor as well as heat. Some time ago I began keeping a list of invented words I’d used, or intended to use.  Since my stories are about as likely to see publication as the Whig party is to win in 2016, it seems fitting to share a few of my favorites.   One class of made up word I use is the modified real word. An example of this occurs in my story “Ini...