K. Marvin Bruce

  Well, I fooled myself.   I thought there was one more chapter to The Space between Atoms , but I was wrong.   All 67 chapters have now been posted.   Now I wait. I have a YouTube channel in my real name.   It has only a handful of videos on it, but the other day one got a comment.   I happened to glance at the stats and saw it’d been viewed 80 times.   I haven’t had time to add any videos over the past two or three years. The point is, even while I’ve been doing other things, some people have been finding what I’ve already done.   Perhaps that’s how one gets recognition?   There comes a time when three years can pass without anyone noticing.   Except the reaper.   I started publishing fiction in my late forties.   That was about a decade ago.   I’m still waiting to get my first novel published.   I’ve written seven. I’ve started on a new novel but I’m reminded of just how much work they entail.   Not that I shy...

I like corvids.  Not the disease, the birds.  Often I sit and listen to the jay's strident call and I smile because I know they, among the smartest of birds, are saying something worthwhile. My short story, "The Hput," has just appeared in Corvus Review .  Here's the link: Hput . This story, like much of fiction, is based on actual events.  A hput is a real thing, but I believe, only three other people on the planet know what it is.  Of those three people one of them has lost touch with me.  Hputs are real.  I saw one just over a year ago. Tales exist of children who develop their own personal languages.  Nobody but their twin/friend can understand it.  The idea of a secret vocabulary isn't something I invented, but I do make use of it.  It makes for a good story. The characters in "The Hput" appear also in "Friday before Senior Year" and in The Space between Atoms .  They are part of a diegesis I'm building.  A universe, if yo...

  I’m so excited.   I’ve finally received a report from the data recovery center and it looks, at this point, like I’ll be able to recover The Space between Atoms .   If so, I’ll be able to resume where we left off starting next week. Recovering data is very expensive.   You see, I had thousands and thousands of files on my backup drive that failed.   It cost more than I’d like to think (let’s just say a new computer would be cheaper) to recover it.   There’s no way I could reconstruct literally over a decade of daily writing. The company I used was kind enough to suggest some better storage solutions.   Hell, these machines look serious.   They also cost a lot of money.   I guess most of us would really not like to think how fragile are data are. Speaking of data, one of the English language watchdog groups—I forget which one—has now declared that singular verbs can be used with “data.”   Data is the plural of datum, but we tend to use ...

 One of the most difficult parts about being creative is that you get carried away with ideas.  I've had four nonfiction books published and lately I've been taken—I mean really taken—with an idea for a fifth.  I've started writing it even before hearing if I'll get a contract for it. In the midst of the mania behind that writing (and I've got so little time to write that it's painful) I received the good news that fiction story number 30 has been accepted for publication.  Not only that, but it has been accepted in  Corvus Review .  I've published there before, but it's exalted company for me and I'm thrilled they like my fiction. Since my disc is still crashed and since I don't have access to The Space between Atoms (never trust a single disc!), this seems like a good time for a celebratory post.  This particular story is called "The Hput" (yes, a hput is a real thing), but it's a thing I can't tell you what means. This parti...

 Did you ever have one of those years?  You know the kind I mean.  The kind of year when your best laid publication plans get shunted aside by the specter of life itself. Many months ago I began posting a novel I've written here ( The Space between Atoms ).  The idea was simple enough—it gave me a regular source of material for weekly posts on this blog, and it might provide a chance for a reader or two to be drawn into the story.  One of the characters actually appears in my published story, "Friday before Senior Year." The disc drive that holds all my files has gone bad and although it happened months ago, I haven't had the time to send it to a disc repair place.  Many files were lost and I simply haven't had time to recover them.  How do you find time for publishing in such a situation? In December of 2020 I prepared eleven stories for publication.  I only sent out two and they've both been rejected already.  I haven't had time to send the...

  My second completed novel—never published, of course—is one I still think is pretty good.   A little long, I admit, but well written.   It actually had three readers who agreed with both points: too long but well written.   One of them said I needed a good editor. I’ve read many overly long books.   Just this year alone I’ve read four novels that reached, nearly reached, or went over 500 pages.   One of the standard chestnuts of writing advice is “write short to write long.”   That only applies to some of us. Life has been so busy lately that I haven’t even been able to send in my damaged disc drive with The Space between Atoms on it, let alone try to get some of my completed stories published.   Some of it has to do with Covid-19, which, I think we’re all glad to see, seems to be releasing its grip on the United States. I submitted a book of short stories to a contest with Press 53 late last year.   It didn’t even win honorable mention, a...

  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...

An external disk crash is a tragedy.  You see, my computer doesn't have much memory.  The little it has is claimed by the increasing size of the operating system at each update.  I back my files up on a WD terabyte drive. The drive failed this week.  Although I hope to get the contents recovered, the remaining chapters of The Space between Atoms reside on that drive.  In fact, the thousands of pieces of my writing yet unpublished do. I don't trust the cloud.  How can you trust something where your files, like a Heisenbergian electron can't be precisely traced?  I like to know where my files are.  Right now they're nowhere.  The silly drive whirs and ticks like an electronic idiot, but it doesn't show where the files are. Data recovery, I've discovered, costs eight times the cost of a disk drive.  The lesson?  Buying half a dozen backup drives is cheaper.  If one disk fails your files are still somewhere. Months of my life went...

  Persistence.   Although 27 doesn’t exactly equate to a tonne, it is a respectable number of stories to have published.   In addition to The Space between Atoms this week—it’ll be up soon!—I have had another acceptance to celebrate. “Christmas Wish” has been accepted by Calliope , one of my favorite places to publish.   They seem to get my offbeat sense of humor.   This story came to me out of the blue and I wrote it very quickly. I then sent it to a zine that didn’t have the courtesy even to reply.   I then saw a themed issue for a horror zine that looked promising.   They were doing a holiday issue and all I had to do was shift the tale from summer to winter, and presto!   It was a Christmas story. The themed magazine liked it, but they said it had too much humor in it.   That sometimes happens when I write horror.   (Not always, as is implied by “sometimes”.)   This one was guilty as charged.   It is a fun story, I hope. M...