K. Marvin Bruce

  The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time.   Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot.   Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group.   Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday.   I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare.   I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run.   And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined.   One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful.   They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only.   Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away.   They also met on Saturdays.   Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...

  A couple pieces of encouraging news, perhaps, dear struggling writers.   I had a couple short stories accepted for publication in recent weeks.   As a fellow writer recently said, “You've got to keep trying.  Somebody will like what you wrote.” That’s a bit of sunshine.   And it’s likely true.   But the stories:   “The Crossing,” about two men in a boat trying to cross the Atlantic, was accepted by JayHenge Publishing.   JayHenge is a small, but paying publisher.   I was flattered when they wanted it for their Masque & Maelström: The Reluctant Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe anthology.   Being associated with Poe in any way feels good. The second story, “St. Spiders’ Day,” had been brewing in my mind for years—yes, this is a long game!   A friend pointed me to The Creepy podcast.   Since the story hadn’t been written, I followed their guidelines of what they wanted.   It worked. I recently heard a successful wri...

Like many people, I had a few days off over the recent holiday season.  Being a working-class writer is not easy, since most employers demand their pound of flesh, and then some, so taking a few days to write was, in a word, bliss. The new year begins with a new round of responsibilities and a boss making renewed demands for more time.  As it is, the time I have to write is measured in minutes rather than hours.  I keep hoping that this will be the year that I’m noticed. Well, I may be exaggerating there a bit.  I started writing fiction, by my recollection, in about 1975.  It may have been earlier, given how sloppy those initial manuscript pages look.  In a working-class family, I didn’t have the first idea about how to get published.  I’m still learning. 2014 was a boon to me, with four fiction pieces published in one calendar year.  That has never happened before.  I first started sending out potential publications in 2009, an...

It must’ve been about a year and a half ago when I discovered Duotrope.  Before that I found literary magazines on the Poet & Writer website.  Everyone wants you to read their magazines to figure out what they like, and that makes sense.  I work full-time, however, and can’t read everything. I love to read, but the working writer faces some unique challenges.  I’m still seeking a publisher for Boeotian Rhapsody, and the other day on Duotrope I found a publisher that wanted authors to submit a marketing plan for their books along with the manuscript.  At least they were very clear—we’re not going to publish unless you do the selling. One of my best friends works in publishing (non-fiction, unfortunately).  I sometimes ask him about this.  Are authors supposed to market their own books? Well, this blog is one answer to that question.  Yes, even established publishers with full staffs have to have author support to make a book succes...

I know a real, live, tenured professor who believes in tulpa.  He once told me how a friend wrote a fiction story, only to have an improbable event from the story happen after it was finished.  It was not something over which he had any control. Tulpa is a concept from eastern religions that suggests a being of pure thought or imagination might take on reality.  Writers, who create characters all the time, are perhaps engaging in tulpa.  We are creating, literally, as well as figuratively. I like the concept.  Many writers know the sensation of the character who refuses to behave.  A person that you make up does not what you want her to do, but what you know she shouldn’t do.  It’s like having an adult two-year-old. This same professor friend once told me that ideas may be created by a collective consciousness, and writers are those sensitive enough to capture those ideas that are floating freely in the ether.  (To be fair, he didn’t ...

Writers explore the depths of humanity’s experience.  At the same time, there are topics that we aren’t allowed to plumb. Let me back up a bit.  When I started to teach myself about which literary magazines would accept what kinds of stories, I spent a lot of time reading the do’s and don’t’s of the editors.  Some won’t allow men to write with a woman’s voice or vice versa.  Others disallow sex scenes and some forbid topics without which Nabokov could never have written Lolita .  Write short, still others say, anything over 1000 words is too long. Being a compliant sort, I tried for a while to avoid those things that would get me into trouble.  When someone is established, however, I’ve noticed, they can break all the rules and get rich.  So why are topics forbidden? I know editors.  A good friend is one.  And editors are people with tastes and prejudices just like the rest of us.  The problem is, there are a limited number ...

I have a confession to make, and it may be shocking coming from a writer.  I’ve never used drugs.  I had a brother who did and some of what happened scared the shit out of me.  That, and my father was a professional alcoholic. “The First Time,” recently published on Dali’s LoveChild , is based on a couple of reflections.  A while back a friend invited me to try hallucinogenic mushrooms, as a spiritual experience.  I politely refused, but wondered what would have happened if I had. You see, growing up in an alcoholic family, you never know what is normal.  I thought the kinds of things involving guns and beer were typical.  You mean you don’t do this at your house?  I went to a bar for the first time before I was five. But my concern is deeper.  I don’t know what reality is.  If I tried shrooms, would I become trapped in an alternate reality?  What if they never wore off?  Sometimes I’m just not very brave. ...

Like most Americans, I don’t understand cricket.  I do know there is a batter and what we would call a pitcher who “bowls” a ball to try to knock down wickets behind the batter.  If the bowler knocks down all three wickets with successive balls, it is called a hat trick. Hat tricks are, by definition, rare events.  According to the venerable Oxford Dictionaries on the somewhat less venerable Internet, the bowler was given a hat to commemorate the feat, thus making it a “hat” trick.  Now any three unexpected successes are called by that moniker. I’ve been submitting to many publishers from my copious backlog of short fiction for about five years now.  For the first four years of my efforts I only found two online magazines willing to put any of my stories out there ( Danse Macabre and Jersey Devil Press ).  Over forty other mags turned me down. Then, out of nowhere, a hat trick.  Three submissions accepted in a row.  I don’t expect th...

I often wonder how many people read my stuff.  That’s the thing about the World-Wide Web.  You’ll never know.  Hits, yes, may be counted.  But who really reads? My writing is metaphorical.  Unapologetically so.  To gather by past responses, this is not a popular or desirable thing.  It is, however, what I do.  I began publishing fiction in 2009.  (I’ve been writing fiction since the 1970s.)  Rejections fell like rain. Over the past month, strangely, there have been a few more open editors.  I feel confused.  Within a three-week period I had acceptances from Dali’s LoveChild (an excellent new surrealist literary magazine) and Deep Water  (a more established, darker venue).  I even had a maybe from Defenestration . I’m a realist, despite my fiction.  I know many more rejections will come.  I still regularly get them.  I submitted a truly creepy story to a magazine that was rejected in less t...

Thanksgiving seems to be an appropriate time to express my gratitude to the editors of Calliope .  Apart from being (to date) the only literary magazine to actually print one of my stories (others, I am grateful, post them online), the editors have nominated “Initiating an Apocalypse” for a Pushcart Prize. I’m enough of a realist to know that my chances of actually winning a prize are slim, but it is nice when a story previously rejected many times is seen to have some potential.  I suspect, but I may be wrong, that writers don’t submit material unless they believe it is good enough to publish. Still, being declined repeatedly wears not only on the ego, but on the soul itself.  It’s easy to feel like a poser or mountebank trying to pass yourself off as a writer.  Still, somewhere deep down, we believe. At times I seriously question whether I should keep at this at all.  The ideas, however, burst out regardless.  Either I will catch them or they...

Some days I can’t seem to find the groove.  I wake up a couple hours before heading to work so that I can write, and some days I just stare blankly at the screen.  As if my mind were allergic to ideas. Then there are the times the Muses trip over each other, trying to crowd into that limited space I call my mind.  I’ll start one story, then an idea for another will come and crowd out the first.  That which seemed so damned urgent can now wait until I get these words down.  But then another idea bursts in, unannounced. I wonder if other writers experience this.  I once knew a media professor who smoked a pipe.  He once said that if he couldn’t find the tobacco he liked he could resort to cigars.  “Or even cigarettes.”  I’ve never smoked.  I don’t see the need to, but his words reminded me of the behavior of my Muses. Some days I work on my novels (my pipe).  I prefer to write long, and I have completed six novels over th...

It was one of the nicest rejection letters I’ve received.  “It’s not you.  It’s me.”  You get the picture.  I’ve lost track of how many times this book has been rejected.  A friend of mine in publishing tells me that publishers are hungry for content.  I’ve got six pretty good novels lying around with very little interest shown. Perhaps I suck as a writer.  I don’t really think so, though.  You see, i read a lot.  On the order of three hours a day a lot.  Some of what I read sucks.  I recognize suckiness.  I don’t produce it. And yet when I submit to a publisher they want three months to consider my work before rejecting it.  You’d think I’d have learned the lesson by now.  If they don’t write back the next day, so excited they can’t stay in their seats, I’ve failed to sway them.  At least that’s how I imagine it must go. This particular novel—the first I’ve seriously tried to publish—is an orphan....

“Infatuation, Technically,” was technically published on the Danse Macabre blog this past week.  This brief tale evolved out of experience working in a office where women are as difficult to get to know as they are arresting.  But the story isn’t really about that. If it weren’t for technology I wouldn’t be a published author (if what I can be called is such).  I make my submissions online and I receive my electronic voice online.  I look at maps online and I haven’t touched a phonebook in years. But still.  I’m still not convinced all of this technology is a good thing.  “Infatuation, Technically” is about the love of technology.  The human element is gone.  I could be dating a clone and wouldn’t even know it.  This food I’m eating never occurred in nature.  That fly buzzing around my head is a drone. A friend told me they are now printing cells with 3-D printers.  What if we haven’t found all the dimensions yet? ...

As the author of six novels (none published) Banned Book Week, which begins tomorrow, always has a special appeal.  People have been writing for over four thousand years, and it might seem that there’s little left to say that won’t offend someone.  So I celebrated Banned Book Week with abandon. There’s no official “western canon” of banned books.  Suffice it to say that if you have a favorite, it’s probably on somebody’s list.  Although we gladly watch televisions shows frothing over with sex and violence, if you try to put it in a book, someone will object.  Loudly. Many cultural heroes, of the literary sort, have spent a stint or two on the banned book lists.  We feel that our children shouldn’t read such things.  They might act out the violence or adult situations and who’s going to clean up after all that?  It is easier to prevent them reading. I recall RIF.  Reading Is Fundamental.  It was a program in full swing when I...

I admire the courage of anyone who publishes fiction.  As a sometime writer of the same, I know that, should anyone read my paltry offerings, I open myself to criticism and critique.  It’s a bit of me on each page I scribble. Still, often I read material that makes me cringe.  Tips from writers who succeeded tell us what to avoid, yet some fiction writers still seem unaware.  Novels full of cliches, telling—not showing, and telling yet again, over-written and lacking subtlety make their way into my hands.  I want to bury my eyes in a box of salt. But there are virtues in such reading.  Perhaps the greatest is that poor writing reminds me that I don’t know how my work appears to others.  I recently read a novel that tried me sorely.  I realized as I read, however, that I was learning on each page. Many of us learn to write by reading good writers.  If we read enough, we take on the successful habits of our idols.  Their caden...

In my unguarded (i.e., optimistic) moments, I sometimes wonder if underselling oneself is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  For example, sending your writing only to small publishers might lead to small returns.  The big guys are scary, however. Sometimes it seems a small press can’t handle big ideas.  Some fiction goes beyond the usual need to tell a story and contains a much deeper message.  After all, all books are farewell letters to the world.  We want to say something important. Although I keep a spreadsheet with my submissions, sometimes stories get lost in the mix.  Once in a while I’ll stumble upon one that I’d forgotten, an orphan of my feverish imagination.  I wonder why I never tried to get it published.  Then I look at my spreadsheet. It is kind of like an idea graveyard.  Big ideas, small ideas.  Lying side by side in unmarked graves since, never having been published, they’ll never be read by anyone other than thei...

Writing a whole novel is difficult.  I've finished five and am nearly done with six.  Seven is almost half-way there. A friend who is a successful writer says, "Write 100,000 words, and throw them away.  Then you're a writer." Personally, I passed that benchmark long ago, maybe even before the invention of computers to mock me with the fact.  But you kind of get used to being out of sight. Consider the invisible man. In the nineteenth century, it seems, publishers were starved for material.  They would publish anything relatively good, just by dint of it being finished.  Today publishers are obese and lazy.  Prone to overlook really excellent writing, because it doesn't bring in enough free lunches. Writing novels, in my experience, means spending hundreds and hundreds of hours going over and re-going over story lines for inconsistency, begging muses to sleep with you, and awaking even more frustrated than you fell asleep. Those who belitt...

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...