K. Marvin Bruce

Life is plenty complicated without writing.   Life’s impossible without writing. You see, I’ve got tons of fiction here.   Well, it be tons if I printed it out.   I’ve been writing every day for decades now.   Long past the limit Neal Stephenson once told me, the 100,000 words you throw out before calling yourself a writer.   The problem is, life’s complicated. I happened into a New York City bookstore.   On the same shelf paperbacks by the aforementioned Neal and Robert Repino.   I know them both.   I returned home and fired up the laptop.   Hundreds of stories.   Half a dozen novels.   Amid all of this, just one story of mine that one small journal thought was worthy of actual ink.   It won third place in a contest. There’s no way to count pre-computer writing.   I was born before the advent of the household CPU.   Before electronic calculators.   We thought the TI-30 was a big deal,...

As an erstwhile professor, I used to research and write academic papers.  As a professor outside the academy, I no longer have the opportunity.  My day job, however, takes me occasionally into the hallowed halls and I start to feel a little lonely for the academic publishing world. Sure, the papers are boring and read by maybe a dozen people, but I never had the difficulty of getting them published that I do with my fiction.  My non-pseudo-nym was fairly well known among colleagues and they knew, as a friend once said, “the author is as important as the story.”  In the fiction realm, I’m nobody. Recently I met with many professors.  The experience divided my loyalties.  Before meeting with them I had been making good progress on my latest K. Marvin Bruce project.  Since meeting with them I’ve been brooding over whether to try more academical writing.  So boring.  So dull.  Yet, I can get it published. It sort of makes me won...

Have you ever noticed that on the days when you desperately need a bit of good news—when you’re viscerally aching for it—these are the days literary magazines send their faceless rejection letters?  The universe is tilted against us. I wrote a piece that looked perfect for The Literary Commute .  It was about commuting, and it was very literary.  Even made subtle reference to Whitman, taking his poem in a direction he wouldn’t want it to go. Even though The Literary Commute is new, they sent me a rejection letter on a Monday, a day of direst need.  I would say I’ve lost count of how many journals have rejected my work, but that would be a lie.  I read enough to know that it is nearly every writer’s story. I had a professor once who said, in paraphrase, “If you’re work is good enough for some people to like, it will be good enough for others to hate.”  It seems the haters outdistance the lovers by a considerable margin. Probably the...