K. Marvin Bruce

  While I’m awaiting word whether the remainder of The Space between Atoms can be recovered, I’m pondering the correct strategy for publishing.   Like most struggling writers, I follow success when I encounter it.   Right now the biggest struggle for me is whether to focus on fiction or non. You see, under my real name I have had four nonfiction books published.   The problem is they’re academic books, expensive and obscure.   Yes, they may rest in the Library of Congress after I’m gone, but I doubt I’ll be joining Poe on Bradbury’s Mars.   Nevertheless, I know how to get such books published. My true love has always been fiction.   I’ve been writing fiction since at least 1974.   I really only attempted publication in 2009.   Although I’ve earned less than $40 from fiction, I’ve managed to have nearly 30 stories published.   My novels have had no success at all. If I were to follow “success” I would go after nonfiction.   My nonfi...

Writing is all about habit.   I recently moved house and with the move I somehow left my old writing habits behind.   Or so it seems.   The fact is I’ve had two non-fiction book assignments in a row and my true love has had to wait. My house didn’t come with a writing nook.   It was a tough market this year and finding some kind of suitable domicile before my apartment lease was up proved a trick for which I wasn’t prepared.   I thought there would be lots of choices, but instead it was catch as catch can.   Writing nooks weren’t in this year. Still, my usual chair was still available and I settled in to try my morning writing.   I had a story accepted for publication—the first time in over a year—and I realized that what I was missing was the drawing in of new material.   I need to see how other people live. There’s a bar within walking distance.   A trendy one that serves only local brews.   There I noticed the be...

This week past was Banned Book Week.  It is kind of a holiday for me as a writer.  For the past several years I have read a banned or challenged book on or about this time.  Of course, much of what I normally read is banned stuff. This practice began when my writing partner Elizabeth was still in school.  As she was assigned classics that I'd never read, I tried to keep up, reading them as though I were assigned the books. Catcher in the Rye , J. D. Salinger's masterpiece, was one such book.  Although it has sat on my shelf for years, I finally got around to reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 .  Kate Chopin's The Awakening ,  John Gardner’s Grendel , Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita ,  and many others have brought new insights to my inner eyes. Although I abhor the idea of books being banned, sometimes it performs a very great service.  Banned books garner a great deal of attention and sometimes become bestsellers because of it....

I try to be patient, but, like Morpheus, I’m well aware that time is against us.   Since I write obsessively, manically, even, and each day reminds me I’m aging, I find waiting months for publishers to be very trying.   Time to take the red pill. Along with my daily efforts to produce new content, I’ve also been working at packaging.  That is to say, putting together a collection of stories to try to farm out to someone who understands me. There are publishers who still do short print runs of collections of short stories.  I own several such collections, and when a novel is too long for the time that I have, I turn to the short story to fill the space.  I’ve written several, and have had thirteen published.  There are many, many more that have offended publishers across the internet. Since the time of finding sympathetic editors seems to have passed, I’m thinking it might be time to put a collection together.  Problem is, I write in severa...

An equation, by definition, has two sides.  Each side ultimately balances the other.  Being a writer is not an equation.  Being a published writer is. I recently had lunch with a friend who is a published author; I’ll feature his book in a post shortly.  As we talked about the long process it took to get his book into print, it dawned on me that I may be a writer, but I still need to play the publishers’ game. As writers we write what we want to express.  We are literate, intelligent, and full of emotion that finds satisfaction only in the written word.  Publishers represent the other side of the equation if we want to become published writers. Publishing is a business while writing is a creative enterprise.  As a writer it is easy to think that we don’t need to please anyone.  Our thoughts are our motivations and our souls are laid bare on paper.  Anyone should want to buy such valuable material. The publisher has to g...

“The writing is good,” and that's half the battle, no?  If I have to get rejection letters, then those with helpful advice are better than those who don’t say why.  Usually I assume my writing just sucks.  The latest letter, however, said the writing is good.  Only the pacing sucks. I’ve always struggled with pacing.  I like to build a mood; too many hours spent with Poe, Lovecraft, and Bradbury.  Never paying close enough attention to my masters.  Thing is, time moves on and tastes change.  I’ve learned to imitate the passé.  Although I’ve had a dozen or so acceptances in my life, each rejection still hurts.  In fact I check my email before leaving for work only.  At least my thankless job dulls the pain from an early morning pinhead letter.  Compared even to my pacing, work is dull. I recall reading Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.  I read it before I saw the movie.  I think of the scene where the ve...

I write for mood.  This was an epiphany I had this week.  I started writing long before I started reading about writing.  What I wrote reflected who I’d been reading—mostly Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury. Contemporary writing gurus indicated that we should cut to the chase.  The modern attention span isn’t comfortable with the building of mood.  They keep a finger on the mouse at all times, my friend, ready to click off your page if a yawn even starts. And this sickness has infected editors.  We want the quick fix.  Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.  Literary foreplay is so twentieth century.  And the millennia before that.  The earliest recorded stories, like the Gilgamesh Epic, are repetitive and build to the action slowly.  We don’t have time for that any more. Many hours of my childhood were whiled away behind a Ray Bradbury collection of stories.  Some were little more than prose tone poems, but they were beautif...

This is the title of a story that Danse Macabre published some months ago.  I wrote it under the influence of Ray Bradbury, who, it must be understood, can take no blame for my admiration.  It used to be if you wrote like Bradbury you’d find a publisher.  Those days have gone. The story concerns a magic necktie.  The necktie in itself is a suggestive accessory.  Not unlike a noose, it often represents the cost of the business world.  It is also the article of clothing most often to fall into your soup or sauce and become utterly destroyed. In one of my classes I had a student who commented on a particular tie I wore.  This one was vibrant with primary colors—flashy for my personality—that my mother had bought me.  It went with nothing, so it went with everything.  A white shirt showed it off best. In the right light the tie seemed to move.  That was, I suppose, the genesis of this story.  A man finds a tie on an accide...