K. Marvin Bruce

Every year about this time I begin to panic.  The myth of perpetual growth suggests that each year should lead to more publications than the previous one, and by November it is clear that I’ve started to slip from my previous lofty goals.  I have reached a total of 18 published stories now, in a total of eight different venues.  Have I grown as a writer? September saw the panic start.  Some journals, particularly those run by college or university departments, only open for submissions with the start of the school year.  A family crisis the first week of September set my plans off kilter for a couple of months.  Now that I’ve regained my footing, it looks like I’ve fallen behind. Over the holiday weekend I was able to send out five of my multiply rejected stories for yet another sortie against the established publishers.  I’ve been working on building my Twitter following in the meantime, but my fiction writing has been suffering.  Every ...

Since those of you reading this don't know me, you'll have to take my word for it.  I'm not an arrogant person. In fact, I tend to be very hard on myself and undervalue what I accomplish.  Still, I do think a lot. I often wonder about writers who think a lot and how they make believable characters who don't.  This may be why I have trouble finding publishers—although my characters aren’t Mary Sues, they tend to be smart and tend to think things through. In my head I know that many people react on impulse and don't think of consequences.  Would crime be an issue, for example, if people thought through the likely outcome?  I have trouble turning it off though.  When my characters do something illogical it tends to be extreme. Bipolar isn't likely an accurate description, but I do tend to be depressed a lot and very happy at other times.  I find that I write better when I'm depressed, probably because it's a form of therapy.  When I'm do...

Psychologists, I’ve read, have come to doubt Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s fives stages of death and dying.  Writers, it seems to me, know quite a bit about these topics, and they hold true to my experience.  I may not be typical in having so little time to write, but I do emote. So the latest literary agent has turned down my once accepted, and multiply-rejected Boeotian Rhapsody for publication.  I can’t believe it (stage one) at first.  The agent’s description seemed to match my genre so well.  Sometimes just opening email is a shock. Why is this so damned hard?  A number—very small, admittedly, but a number nevertheless—of short fiction publishers like my work.  They don’t publish books, of course.  Still, why can’t anybody give me a chance?  I guess I’m at stage two. I consider writing back to the agent.  Maybe making my case.  This, however, is the kiss of death in publishing.  Agents like quick, clean, and no com...

Writing keeps me sane.  Writing drives me insane.  Often the only stability that I have in a tortured world is my writing.  Of course, writing doesn’t pay.  Long ago I made myself a note inside the cover of my commonplace book: “whether published or not, I am a writer.” A factor that is difficult to include in this equation is depression.  Like many writers I live in a miasma of low-grade depression much of the time.  It even fuels my art.  I write my most humorous material when I am despondent.  There is a depression that is debilitating, however, and even causes writing to become a strain. “There is a wisdom that is woe,” Herman Melville wrote, “but there is a woe that is madness.”  Yes, Herman, I have been there with you.  At times it is so dark that I can only glimpse Poe or Lovecraft as my guides, distantly ahead.  In the twilight we find each other. Since being released from my contract with Vagabondage Pre...