K. Marvin Bruce

  I’m taking a little break from The Space between Atoms this week to share some news.   I hasten to add that the “struggling” part of “blog of a struggling writer” doesn’t refer to the struggle to write.   It’s the struggle to get published.   The Space between Atoms is finished, just being unveiled slowly. The news involves overcoming, for a little while, the struggle of getting published.   My twenty-fourth story, “Planet Heaven,” has been accepted for publication.   It will appear in the next issue of Sein und Werden (“being and becoming,” roughly).   This particular story was finished ten years ago. I submitted it to a now defunct mag.   They didn’t like it.   It sometimes takes me awhile to recover from rejection.   I suffer from what one of my friends calls aporripsophobia, the fear of rejection. Then there was a publishing website—I forget its name—that had a call for submissions that was perfect for this story.   I submi...

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...