K. Marvin Bruce

Like many writers, I prefer longhand to keyboard composition.  There’s something natural and calming to holding a pen in one hand and head in the other, imagining away the day before a stack of paper. Like most writers I don’t have time for longhand composition.  The great nemesis of creativity—work—limits writing time to minutes a day, except on the weekends.  If I ever wish to get published, I have to do it with my hands in my lap.  (I have a laptop that serves as my ersatz brain.) Editing, in my experience, is easier on a printed manuscript.  The electronic world plays tricks on your eyes.  We have to develop the skill to read on a screen.  For over five thousand years writing was strictly hardcopy.  Now it almost never is. When my novel, The Passion of the Titans , had been accepted by Vagabondage Press, I was elated.  It has been a lifelong dream to have a novel published.  Then the clouds rolled in.  I had an emai...

It is a truism that if you're famous you’ll have no trouble publishing a book.  For instance, I’m currently reading Contact by Carl Sagan.  I’ve seen the movie, and in a moment of not having anything new on my fiction shelf, I went back to Contact , which I had started years ago. Not all books are thrill rides, of course.  I’m not really a thriller fan, but there’s a je ne sas quoi about most literary novels that keeps you coming back.  In Contact , it’s clear that the author is a scientist. Not that one has to be a literary professional to become a writer.  I think of Michael Critchton, who wrote several bestsellers, despite being a medical doctor by profession.  I often wonder how people like that get started. I’m not a literary professional either.  I have, however, finished six novels and had very little success getting any interest built in them.  I wrote Passion of the Titans when Clash of the Titans had been announced but b...

I’m working on a steampunk novel.  Although none of my other novels have yet found a publisher, one of them has been submitted to an agent and I sit with my fingers so tightly crossed that typing is difficult.  The Passion of the Titans , as it was originally called, had been accepted for publication only to have the indie press renege on its contract.  So it goes. This isn’t about that. My current project is all about gears and corsets and gentlemen adventurers.  There’s a dirigible, of course.  And absinthe.  What is steampunk without absinthe? As the child of a professional alcoholic, controlled substances take on a dark cast in my mind.  I overcame my fear of beer over a Guinness in a crowded bar in Boston while studying for a master’s degree in one of the many schools in the city.  I still don’t drink to excess, but my former enemy has become an occasional friend. But absinthe.  Once claimed to be psychotropic, it was il...

The internet has filled the world with noise.  Communications specialists tell us that it is important to distinguish signal from noise since signal is potentially useful information.  Ah, but the internet is so vast!  SETI would have more chance of finding signal in an infinite universe. So when I heard from my contracted publisher that Passion of the Titans , my first novel accepted for publication, is being released back to me, my breath caught in my throat.  Perhaps I should’ve heard the signal earlier.  Accepted last summer, it was downgraded to an ebook release this spring, and then finally cancelled. Wheat and chaff are very different from one another.  As are sheep and goats.  Signal and noise are far more ambiguous. Like Edgar Allan Poe, and probably here the likeness ends, I have read many inferior bits of literature that have engulfed public demand.  Has anybody ever tried to praise the literary merits of Fifty Shade...

I’ve been talking to my friend Steve about rejection.  You see, the constant stream of rejection letters for someone trying his damnedest to be heard is felt by both editors and authors.  Mostly authors. Steve has a blog, Sects and Violence in the Ancient World , that used to get nearly a thousand hits a day.  Now he barely gets a hundred.  Perhaps the world of the internet has already grown weary of what he has to say. For my part, every few months I get brave and lob three or four stories to literary magazines and sit back to wait for the rejection letters to roll in.  I’ve had six short stories published.  All but two were first rejected before someone else saw a little value or entertainment in them. I’m told that writers must have thick skin.  I also know that I put an awful lot of myself into my stories.  Yes, rejection is personal.  It can be nothing else. Even Vagabondage Press, who will be publishing my Passion of t...

Now that January’s come, and nearly gone, we know the Mayan calendar was wrong.  Not to worry—this is something that any writer knows—the end of the story hasn’t been written yet. I’ve been writing for decades now.  One of the earliest lessons I learned, once I’d turned from short stories to novels (I’ve written several, but The Passion of the Titans is the first to interest a publisher), is that writers are near-sighted.  Oh, I’m not denying that there are visionaries out there, but when I write, I may have a plan for my characters that is never realized.  Like in life, unseen circumstances intervene.  Some writers, I’ve been told, sketch out the storyline ahead of time and know just what is going to happen. Like the Mayan, however, they might be surprised.  At least I am.  I start a novel with an end in mind: my personal 2012.  That end suggests a beginning, for there’s a story here to be told.  The means of getting from th...

One of the few things that truly cause me happiness has just occurred.  I’ve seen my most recent story published.  I’m so happy, I’ll use an exclamation point! Those of you who’ve tried writing know what an accomplishment this is.  You’ve spent your life reading stuff that’s not as good as what you do, and then end each day with a pile of rejection letters so tall that you need a ladder to reach the top.  Just a moment of vindication, and you’re ready to start all over again. My first story published, “O Tannenbaum,” appeared in the online magazine Danse Macabre in December of 2009. It won an award for most macabre Christmas story that year.  Danse Macabre has since become my main squeeze for getting published.  They get it. Recently Jersey Devil Press joined the exclusive club of those who don’t automatically reject whatever I submit.  “Good for the Gander,” the story about a troubling goose attack, appeared this week.  You can r...

The Passion of the Titans is a sexy book.  Quite apart from the expected libido of a rock star, Medusa is, in a word, hot.  A young goddess in a world literally full of Adonises and Apollos.  What is a girl to do? Studies have shown that priming yourself can deepen creativity.  It’s probably just evolution in action, but thinking about sex makes you more creative.  It may seem sexist, but the old saw about the hapless writer working away with the picture of a naked (fill in the gender) in from of him/her (select one) is accurate.  Blame it on your hormones. No one knows whence creativity emerges.  Ornaments and flourishes hardly seem necessary in the hard business of living life.  Some of us would rather die at our writing desks than give it up.  Our nature compels us to create, to be gods. Creativity, like libido, ebbs and flows and surges and gushes.  Some days you might as well be in the Atacama Desert, not even a cactu...

While The Passion of the Titans will be my first published novel—something about which I’m very excited—it is far from the first novel I’ve written.  It comes in at number four.  Nestled between my master’s degree and doctorate was my first completed novel.  Written while I was largely unemployed, trying to help my new wife make ends meet, I plunked out a clunker that I only ever very briefly considered sending out to publishers.  I’ve still got a copy somewhere. I find that it is important to keep copies of even failed writing attempts. My first attempted novel dates back to about seventh grade.  I was a sickly child and while home from school with one bout of flu or another, I began writing a somewhat developed, multi-chapter story.  As a somewhat more mature writer, years later I ripped the pages in half in embarrassment.  As an even more mature writer, years later I taped them back together. I began work in ernest on a novel while teachi...

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...