K. Marvin Bruce

  I recently submitted my Medusa novel to a publisher I found because they approached me to review one of their books.   Now, my nonfiction blog isn’t a big deal.   With only a couple hundred regular readers I’m sure it didn’t lead to sales.   The book, honestly, wasn’t that good. Still, the website was friendly and welcoming.   As I filled in the proposal form I was honest, as it asked me to be.   How many copies, it asked, do you think your book will sell?   Be honest, it advised.   I put a number, realistic, that my own publisher would’ve been satisfied with.   Most books, truth be told, sell less than 1,000 copies. When they sent their rejection note a week later they said that I wasn’t well enough established as a fiction writer.   In other words, I couldn’t bring in enough money.   I’m not established enough?   How are you ever going to get established if even a small publisher like that won’t give you a chance? Here’s ...

Life is plenty complicated without writing.   Life’s impossible without writing. You see, I’ve got tons of fiction here.   Well, it be tons if I printed it out.   I’ve been writing every day for decades now.   Long past the limit Neal Stephenson once told me, the 100,000 words you throw out before calling yourself a writer.   The problem is, life’s complicated. I happened into a New York City bookstore.   On the same shelf paperbacks by the aforementioned Neal and Robert Repino.   I know them both.   I returned home and fired up the laptop.   Hundreds of stories.   Half a dozen novels.   Amid all of this, just one story of mine that one small journal thought was worthy of actual ink.   It won third place in a contest. There’s no way to count pre-computer writing.   I was born before the advent of the household CPU.   Before electronic calculators.   We thought the TI-30 was a big deal,...

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...