K. Marvin Bruce

Sometimes it is all I can countenance even to consider submitting a piece of fiction for publication.  You know, I always thought artists were sensitive people, but these days we’re told to have thick skins—not to take rejection personally.  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like what you’ve spent hours and hours creating, honing, and polishing.  It’s nothing personal.” My day job is a professor at a nondescript college.  I still do research now and again, and like my fiction it is generally rejected before somebody else picks it up and says its worth a look.  Sometimes it is said even to be good. I wrote a scholarly book some years back.  I sent it around to publishers who didn’t like it for various reasons, and so it languished while I moved on to other things.  Recently three publishers approached me about it, expressing an interest.  Ah, editors!  Ye are such a fickle breed! Fiction, however, is far more personal.  It is mined fro...

Sometimes it is all I can countenance even to consider submitting a piece of fiction for publication.  You know, I always thought artists were sensitive people, but these days we’re told to have thick skins—not to take rejection personally.  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like what you’ve spent hours and hours creating, honing, and polishing.  It’s nothing personal.” My day job is a professor at a nondescript college.  I still do research now and again, and like my fiction it is generally rejected before somebody else picks it up and says its worth a look.  Sometimes it is said even to be good. I wrote a scholarly book some years back.  I sent it around to publishers who didn’t like it for various reasons, and so it languished while I moved on to other things.  Recently three publishers approached me about it, expressing an interest.  Ah, editors!  Ye are such a fickle breed! Fiction, however, is far more personal.  It is mi...

My first story in Jersey Devil Press was about literary wish-fulfillment.  The idea was that, if someone loved literature enough, it would literally come alive whenever a book was opened.  As someone who has always wanted to have a published novel, this was the most guilty pleasure I could imagine. For those of us who write, everyday reality can often be painful.  We work jobs whose sole objective, on most days, seems to be to crush the very creativity from us.  I awake inspired every morning, and return from work each day completely emptied and dispirited.  Life, but not as we know it. “Literary Ops” was a story of profound hope.  Although the protagonists awake each day to various, historic world empires attempting to destroy their home (let the reader who has eyes to see understand) they may rebuff attacks by knowing just which author calms the marauding hordes.  In my dreams, life is that simple. In today’s business-driven world, the...

After lurking around the fringes of the World Wide Web for several years, I’m pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of my novel, The Passion of the Titans with Vagabondage Press next summer.   The Passion of the Titans is the story of Medusa, told from her own point of view—if you want to know how that’s possible, I urge you to read the book!  I’ll give you a hint, though.  Rock-and-roll did not begin with Little Richard, Chuck Berry, or Elvis Presley.  It started a long, long time ago in a land far away. For those of you who’d like a little taste of the my other work, I’d point you to the excellent online magazine Danse Macabre .  My first piece published there, “O Tannenbaum,” won the 2009 prix d’écriture de Noël in Fiction for the magazine.  Unfortunately, in this age of impermanent servers and services, the piece has disappeared into cyberspace.  My second story, “Hide and Seek,” appeared and disappeared in the same journal...